The Words Made Flesh

I like strolling through a good museum and I never seem to do it enough. Well, almost never…

It was the spring of 2008 when a friend and I flew down to Virginia to visit another friend, a retired Army officer who lives in Williamsburg. We landed on a warm, sunny April afternoon, which slowly turned overcast and then devolved into two days of heavy, steady rain. Our plans to spend most of the time either drinking around her pool or taking our potent potables to Virginia Beach were washed out, so we ended up touring every museum in the area, including Yorktown and Jamestown. As much as I enjoy imagining what life was like before modern conveniences made human existence both easier and more problematic, even I have a limit as to how many shards of pottery or whale bone buttons I can peruse in a 48-hour period.

At least we have objects like tools, apparel and even full-sized fossils of our forerunners to demonstrate how we evolved from apes in trees to cretins with cars. What scientists can’t tell us, and probably never will, is how and when we chattering primates became linguistic lords of the manor.

Oh, they have theories. Scientists always have theories. Here are four of them, in no particular order:

Animal Farm

Language is a behavior, not a physical attribute, so there’s no one part of our grey matter that governs it. Instead, it’s sparked by different circuits also shared by other species. My neighbors have a parrot named Nickie who can verbalize his burning desire for “carrots, carrots!” Our cousins the monkeys have different warning calls to distinguish between leopards, snakes, raptors or other voracious beasties. And check out the hanged dog look on Fido’s face the next time you berate him for pooping in your new shoes. Take all these verbal and non-verbal odds and ends and you have the makings for language. Of course, these furry and feathered critters don’t have the complex brains that would allow Nickie to tell Fido, “Yo! Fide! I saw your bitch smelling another dawg’s butt.”

Put Your Hands Where I Can See ‘Em

Once our ancestors stopped walking around on their knuckles, their hands quickly evolved into the mitts we know, love and use today, while it took many, many more moons before our vocal chords developed. It’s a possibility that the earliest form of human language was hand signals and those would have suited primitive hunters like their own fur coats. The first rule of stalking prey is “keep your big trap shut” so signing instead of saying, “The mastodon went that a-way,” would have put more meat on the communal rock slab. Once our throats got longer and our mouths smaller, signing may have became sounds, which would have made it much easier to gab while fashioning a flint knife or telling scary saber-toothed tiger stories in a dark cave.

Rock-a-Bye, Baby

Personally, I find baby talk annoying as hell (which is probably why I speak to infants as if they were college grads) but that lilting rhythm is an innate part of our behavior and may have been the antecedent to language. Not only is music and speech processed in the same part of the brain and used by species like birds to communicate, even the Big Kahuna of evolution, Charles Darwin, talked about early romantics singing love songs to each other before there was language. Who knows? Maybe there was a way early version of Zep’s “Immigrant Song.”

Mammal Babble

If singing or signing doesn’t do it for you, maybe this will. Killer whales in the same pod have a distinct dialect, which enables them to tell if another big bruiser is part of their tribe. Our ancestors also lived in small groups, so developing a distinctive sound for their own clan would have cut down on pesky visitors who tried to muscle in on their watering hole.

This last theory is the one that makes the most sense to me. In a year that’s seen vicious arguments over the building of a mosque near Ground Zero and stricter immigration laws in Arizona, the millennia-old motto, “Us vs. Them," still seems to be our favorite.