If you have spent time with an infant, you might recognize the scene: A child is wailing, inconsolable, and you, the parent, have to go to the bathroom. Or eat. Or attend to a pot that’s boiling over. But someone needs to watch the baby.
Such urgent situations often call for innovation. In modern times, we might negotiate schedules with our partners, seek out affordable child care, or purchase “baby-tainment” contraptions via our phones. Sometimes, in moments of desperation, we could even allow our tiny offspring to stare at said phones for some respite.
But a long time ago, our early-human ancestors were caring for children under decidedly more precarious conditions. Receiving some help with the baby could be a matter of life and death. A new book argues that the prehistoric need for assistance may have been so intense that it led to the creation of one of the human species’ most defining traits: language.
In The Origin of Language, Madeleine Beekman, a professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, considers human evolution through the often-neglected lens of child-rearing, bringing a relatively new perspective to the field. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, most popular theories of evolution focused on male-dominated, and in many cases aggressive, activities such as hunting, fighting, toolmaking, and semen-spreading to understand our development as a species.
But Beekman, along with a growing number of scholars, many of them women, emphasizes familial care in our understanding of human evolution. Specifically, she turns to the scenario of a needy small child relying on a parent, in attempting to unlock the mystery of the origin of human language.
Beekman begins the book by tracing the evolutionary steps that made language possible—and necessary. First came the biological changes to the human body, genetic mutations followed by natural selection. At one point during our transition from ape to human, our heads shifted position so we could stand erect, and our vocal cords elongated, which then allowed us to make a wider variety of sounds. (Lest you believe evolution always knows best, these changes also made it very easy to choke. Today, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death.)
Meanwhile, because of diet and other factors, our early ancestors’ brains kept growing and growing. Their brains got so big, so complex, that they failed to reach a state of maturity inside the womb. Some biologists theorize that early human fetuses’ heads risked growing too large to pass through the pelvis; others believe that gestating brains required too much energy for a pregnant woman to sustain them through self-sufficiency. For whatever reason, our babies emerged from the womb less mature in comparison with other species.
What does this have to do with language? Beekman ties it all together like this: Early humans were giving birth to deeply vulnerable and demanding offspring, and they couldn’t manage with the tools they had; this is where vocal cords came in handy. In time, Beekman argues, people strung together noises—pah, mah, kah, dah, and so on—into words, and then structured those words into syntax and grammar, in order to help them cooperate and communicate, first and foremost, with and about their offspring.
Beekman proposes a novel answer to a question that has long confounded evolutionary thinkers. Although many evolutionary biologists are reluctant to single out homo sapiens as exceptional among all living things, there is something undeniably unusual about language—its musicality, complexity, and clear relationship to abstract thinking. Alfred Russel Wallace, a co-discoverer of natural selection alongside Charles Darwin, famously struggled with placing language into the long arc of evolution; his successors have not done much better. In fact, in the mid-to-late-1800s academic societies in France and the United Kingdom banned discussion of the origins of language because scientists felt this part of the field was too speculative.
The consensus that the origins of language could not be rigorously investigated lasted until the middle of the 20th century. In the late 1950s, Burrhus Frederic Skinner theorized that language acquisition is similar to other types of learning. He thought the construction of words essentially amounted to a matching game between sounds and meanings, aimed squarely at the practicalities of communication. Later, Noam Chomsky published a competing set of explanations. Chomsky thought that humans were born with a “language acquisition device” that allowed us to make sense of syntax and grammar. Speech was not just a matter of mechanical ability; it was also an expression of uniquely human symbolic understanding.
Beekman writes that there’s partial support for both theories: Language is both innate and acquired, meaning we are born with a complex receptivity to it, and we also learn it through matching games. Yet Beekman contends that neither of these concepts elucidates the origin of language, without which it is impossible to understand its prehistoric function.
So what catalyzed the leap from the nonlinguistic communication found in the animal kingdom—the eye contact, the grunts, the chest-beating—to the words you are reading right now? Beekman argues that language developed slowly to fulfill the requirements of child-rearing. “With every improved fragment of speech, and every moment of shared understanding, we raised the likelihood our babies—and our species—would survive,” she writes.
Over time, Beekman argues, more and more humans attempted to use language, and as they engaged with it, the neural connections in their brains adapted to it—a process known as neuroplasticity. Those humans who were good at it, even in its most rudimentary forms, would have a real advantage. Young children who could verbally express their needs were more likely to survive than those who could not. And mothers who communicated effectively were more likely to figure out their children’s needs. They may have also been more likely to corral assistance from other caregivers, thus increasing the odds that their children would live into adulthood—and that they themselves would make it through the dark and dangerous tunnel of childbirth and early parenthood and go on to have more children.
Beekman furthers her argument by taking a close look at the psychology of babies. Although they are born fairly helpless, infants have a few survival tricks up their swaddles. They are “master mind readers,” Beekman writes—deeply attuned to the body language and psychological state of their overseers. This quickly developing sense of another person’s consciousness, and a desire to connect with it, could have laid the groundwork for language acquisition.
My main frustration with this book is that it takes a while to arrive at the human parent-child relationship, instead focusing on larger evolutionary questions, and once it gets there Beekman rushes through explorations of the day-to-day realities for our long-ago ancestors. I understand that any such portrait would be speculative, and that a lingering look into the communicative capabilities of, for example, ants can teach us something about homo sapiens. Still, I yearned for more homo sapiens.
Beekman makes it clear from the beginning that all theorizing on the origins of language is conjecture: “We have no consensus, and perhaps never will, because the soft tissue involved in thinking and talking doesn’t fossilize.” Nevertheless, the past two decades in evolutionary thought have brought more attention to the idea that child care shaped our species in fundamental ways. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written extensively about the cooperative nature of raising children through early human history, arguing that no single mom had the resources to raise a child on her own. Hrdy believes that our broader capacity to cooperate comes from the need to collaborate over child care. Dean Falk, who specializes in paleoneurology, has suggested that language originated with mothers who needed a way to connect with their babies when they got tired of holding them, and thus developed sounds to soothe them at a distance.
This recent focus on care and interdependence has some historical roots. Most of us associate Darwin with his theories on competition, or the “survival of the fittest”—a phrase he didn’t write, but would later go on to use. Less widely known is his writing on cooperation. “Communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring,” he writes in The Descent of Man. As Darwin saw it, this impulse to be good to others is rooted in our affection for our children.
When Beekman and other thinkers bring the realm of parental care into their work, they are making the case for how central this component of human survival has been in our collective formation. Having babies didn’t just ensure the future of humanity in a practical, assembly-line kind of way. The complicated and enriching work of raising individual babies was also important, pushing humans to discover new internal capacities and modes of connection.
These observations are relevant beyond academic or prehistoric settings. Parenthood, in much of the world, is now a far more isolated undertaking than it was for our ancestors. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that advancements in technology and standards of living have allowed parents to raise kids without much communal help. But just because we can manage siloed parenting in practical terms doesn’t mean it is the healthiest way to do so for parent or child. Beekman’s reading of the distant past gives us a chance to reckon with just how unnatural it is for parents to go it alone in the present and just how much we might be losing in the process. Caring for kids has been—and could be again—a collective effort that pushes us to imagine (or rediscover) different ways of living. Language is one example of an innovation that may well have been born of interdependence. What else might we learn about ourselves by viewing our past, and perhaps our future, as a story of cooperative care? To find out, we would have to reexamine how we think about parenting.
The post Was Language a Parental Invention? appeared first on The Atlantic.
