How did language (spoken) come into being? ( 1,his,ch 1)?
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We don’t know for sure, but we can speculate.
Vocalizations are common tools for communication among all primates — and many other mammals as well. In its very beginning, it’s likely that human language wasn’t much different from the vocalizations employed by other primates. Those weren’t words, exactly, by simple messages that conveyed emotional states, desires, and warnings.
The fact that early humans, like other primates, were social animals, meant that communication was an essential tool for survival. We had to be able to communicate effectively enough with our neighbours in order to evade predators and deal with all kinds of problems.
At the same time, natural selection kept favouring larger and larger brains as our main survival strategy. These larger brains were useful to craft better tools and the such, but they also synergized very well with our constant need to interact with other human beings. This likely caused our initially simple vocalizations to become more and more refined, just like the tools and weapons we used. Our bodies also took notice of this increase of verbal complexity, and, gradually, natural selection made our mouths and respiratory organs more suited to pronounce complex sounds effectively.
It’s not possible to know when human language first acquired the level of complexity that we now see in modern languages, but it was probably a slow and gradual process that accompanied our evolutionary path of evolving bigger and bigger brains.
Vocalizations are common tools for communication among all primates — and many other mammals as well. In its very beginning, it’s likely that human language wasn’t much different from the vocalizations employed by other primates. Those weren’t words, exactly, by simple messages that conveyed emotional states, desires, and warnings.
The fact that early humans, like other primates, were social animals, meant that communication was an essential tool for survival. We had to be able to communicate effectively enough with our neighbours in order to evade predators and deal with all kinds of problems.
At the same time, natural selection kept favouring larger and larger brains as our main survival strategy. These larger brains were useful to craft better tools and the such, but they also synergized very well with our constant need to interact with other human beings. This likely caused our initially simple vocalizations to become more and more refined, just like the tools and weapons we used. Our bodies also took notice of this increase of verbal complexity, and, gradually, natural selection made our mouths and respiratory organs more suited to pronounce complex sounds effectively.
It’s not possible to know when human language first acquired the level of complexity that we now see in modern languages, but it was probably a slow and gradual process that accompanied our evolutionary path of evolving bigger and bigger brains.
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