May 1, 2012 • 27 mins
" Sure animals talk in their own way, with chirps and grunts and the like, but only humans can form words. It is this, some evolutionary psychologists contend, that is what truly separates us from the rest of the species on the planet. But why us?"
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. With me is always this Charles W.
Chucker Bryant and uh that makes this stuff you should know?
(00:25):
Is your seat? Okay, Frank, the chair is letting me
down again. Yeah, he'll do that. Cher he recently fell
in with a bad crowd and I do too, from
the way he's making me said, So I'll just I'll
lean forward. He's become unreliable. Who is it that messes
with him? I don't know. Somebody who has no idea
(00:48):
how to sit in a chair properly. That's how you
need to get next, not just your own mic cover,
but your own chair. Yeah. I think it's a strickling
guy from tech stuff. It would be very cool as
if you had it lower down from the ceiling like
it was stored up there, and then hang like the
sort of damocles over everybody else's head while they were recording.
We'll look into that, Chuck. Have you ever heard of
(01:12):
a little place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yeah, okay,
go eggheads. UM. So M I T is like the hotbed,
the center of the linguistics field, among many other fields
I didn't know. Yeah. Um Noam Chomsky is there. UM.
(01:37):
And there's another guy whose name escapes me right now,
but he recently made some headlines because he, I guess,
got a grant and had his house wired with fish
I cameras in every room with really high tech audio
equipment to and from the moment his newborn son came
home to the age of five. This guy recorded ninety
(02:00):
thousand hours the whole five years of this kid's life. UM,
in an effort to see how language acquisition develops in children.
That's pretty cool, and this child specifically, it is very cool.
There's a really clumsily titled UM Fast Company article called
M I T. Scientists captures ninety thousand hours of video
(02:23):
of his son's first words Comma, grafs it, comma what
graphs it? He and then he grafts it. Yeah. The
editor was like, I'm going home, yeah exactly so UM.
But anyway, there's some video and some audio clips in
there where you can hear like this condensed like over
five years or over like a six month period. Or
something like that. That's like the kid going from like
(02:45):
gaga to water and you can hear it like evolve. Interesting.
Did they learn anything from that? I don't know if
they have quite yet. And plus I mean like this
is one child, but it's at the very least very
very interesting. Um. But the the idea that you can
learn something about the evolution of language and human beings
(03:07):
from language acquisition and children is a hotly contested idea. UM,
you wrote what I think is a very fine article. Thanks.
You did a good job with this. How did language evolve?
It was shorty you were talking about, though not how
we acquire language skills as as um kids, but as
a species. How did humans acquire language? Because we're the
(03:30):
only ones that can say things like this, But you
go to great lens to point out that we're not
the only ones that communicate. True, I wouldn't say great
links that sort of al It was like two or
three sentences, Sure animals communicate. Well, no, it is. It
is very true, and I think it was a good
thing to start off with because humans can often be
very um homocentric. You know, so you say birds chirp,
(04:00):
porpoises go right, Yeah, uh, there are community. We're the
only ones who converbialize. That's right, right, Yes, we talk words.
And we don't know exactly how this evolved for sure, because, um,
there's a problem when it comes to things like evolution.
There's not a ton of evidence. A lot of times
(04:21):
like hard evidence. Um, I read this one guy's paper.
There's a lot of papers on this. Yeah, this is
a really First of all, I want you to just
be very quiet. Do you hear that off in the
business the explosion? Yes, we're standing in the midst of
a mine field. Linguistics is a mine field, and they
(04:43):
love like linguistics. People really love language and talking about
it like and putting down people who disagree with them.
So we should tread lightly here, we should. Um. But
one guy's paper that I read today meets some university paper.
He said that ideally, if we're going to study something
like these neurological changes that happened in the brain, we
(05:04):
would have, um, a large number of petrified whole brains
representing lots of species over lots of time. But we
don't have that. Unfortunately, they're big gaps. Uh. And even
even even not taking into account gaps, we don't have
fossilized brains. Yeah, the closest thing we have is a
(05:27):
fossilized skull, which we can analyze and be like, well,
there is kind of room for a big enough brain
maybe for language. Yeah, what's that called cranial indocasting? I
think so, Um, that's a that's a good term for it.
And people won't even know if I'm wrong. Um. What
they do have a little bit of evidence on is
(05:47):
that the shape of our vocal tract um wasn't until
about a hundred thousand years ago, wasn't able to even
able to make um, the vocalizations of the modern speech sounds.
So it wasn't even possible, Although that doesn't necessarily mean
there wasn't language, because it just could have been a
(06:07):
much more primitive version of what evolved of grunts. Yeah, exactly,
and I did see someone. Even though that's all this
was poo pooed by most people. Uh, some people think
that spoken language of all from sign language, and that
our modern gestures are holdover from that, which I thought
was interesting, but most people go, now that's not true. Um.
(06:29):
I ran into another one. And what you're talking about, um,
for everybody listening, is called a proto language, and evidence
of a proto language supports one theory, which we'll talk
about in a minute. But um, one idea for proto
language is that we started talking using on a monopeia,
which would make snap crackling pop like the oldest words
(06:49):
on earth, you know. Um. But well, I guess we
should probably get into it now, Like what are there
basically two competing theories for how we whire the language
as a species? Right? Yeah? And I like both of them.
I noticed at the end You're like, why can't we
all just get along as far as linguistics go? Because
(07:09):
I'm not a linguist, and so I'm not gonna sit
here and poople and argue um because I'm not smart enough.
I don't know enough about it. But the first Josh
is um that we adapted to survive, so we learned
how to speak. Then that's kind of the simplest way
to say it. Um. The example I gave in here
is uh. And then we'll talk about who you know,
(07:33):
who are the leaders in this whole category that believed this?
But uh took took's hunting on the range on the
plains in the Savannah, and took took um thunder scares
away the deer, so Took Took goes hungry. So then
later on Took took his already maybe learned to grunt
(07:53):
about like the deer being being nearby to his buddy.
Who's his friend? Did we name every name my friend?
Oh more Morty. Yeah, so he's already learned how to
tell Morty that deer nearby, so shut up, right, because
Morty talks incessantly. Uh So, now all of a sudden,
he learns that thunder and bad weather might scare deer away,
(08:16):
so he goes hungry. So he learns now, I've got
to learn like what bad weather looks like coming in
and how to tell Morty, hey, pick up the paste, dude,
because bad weather is coming and we don't want to
go hungry again. So that was just one of the
stepping stones in evolving speech, right, And it is kind
of like, um, the the idea behind it is that
(08:38):
the speech evolved out of the combinations of these things,
like you're saying, yeah, so you put them together and
all of a sudden, huh that makes a lot of sense.
I'm able to describe some larger portion of the world
around us. Yeah, And that's got more complex. The language
had to like as they learn more things, right, like
we settled down and sure culture would have had like
(08:59):
a you jimpact on something like that. Yeah, and keeping
children alive apparently, like once we settled in villages, A
lot of people think that language really took a leap
forward because we had to, you know, keep the species
alive by protecting the kids. Um. I guess also the
idea that you could warn somebody about something, right that
(09:21):
isn't necessarily just something you could point at and be like,
you know, let's get out of here through gesture, something
maybe further away, something that you couldn't see right then,
that would that would lead directly to um to a
trait that was that led to survival, which is the
whole basis of natural selection, which means that people who
(09:42):
could do that would be able to go reproduce, and
that trait would survive and be passed along. And I
imagine reproduction and all needed its own language as well, right,
you know, I'm like, hey, mama, although in Quest for
Fire it pretty much just happened, didn't I haven't seen
that so long. I think that was the first movie
I ever saw in showtime and Yeah, there wasn't a
(10:04):
lot of words going on. It was like, you know,
the ladies are down by the river bending over, filling
up water buckets and or you know, water pods and
man comes along and just you know, takes care of business. Yeah?
Is that? Is that an ancient phrase? Takes care of business?
TCB YEA. So I remember Quest for Fire and another movie. Um,
(10:29):
we're out on showtime at about the same time a
movie is called Caveman and it started Ringo Star. Is
that his picture that is in this article? Yeah, don't
you like my caption? Yeah? That's I couldn't. I couldn't
tell just by looking at it, but um yeah, the caption,
I think is what gave it away. These were the
old days where I would like the highlight of my
week was writing really clever picture captain star articles. I
(10:50):
would go home and say, look at this one, Emily,
it's pretty good. Someone might get this joke. So there's
a production still of from Caveman of Ringo Star standing
there and the caption is this cave by Caveman gets
by with a little help from his friends, beautiful Matty
guest producer Mattie. Yeah, so that's adaptation theory that basically
(11:10):
we figured out that we could survive better and more
robustly by talking to one another, and language evolved in
fits and starts through there. Right. Yeah. And who who's
gradually I should say gradually? Yes? Um? And that's Stephen Pinker,
who's a great dude. Yeah. Pinker and Bloom in their
paper Natural Language and Natural Selection. Uh. I mean there
are a lot of people who agree with them and
(11:31):
have written quote unquote the book on this since then,
or several books. It's very dense subject. Makes my mind
melt a little bit. Um, and Pinker and Bloom basically say, uh,
this is the case. It makes sense. This is just
(11:52):
standard Darwinian natural selection. What's the problem. I don't have
a problem with it. Why doesn't everybody just get on board? Uh? Well,
because there's another competing theory, and there are all sorts
of sub theories, but these are the two big big daddies. Um,
and this is no nom Chomsky and um. Evolutionary biologists
(12:12):
Stephen Jay Gould, and they think that it was a
spandrel or an axaptation. So you know what a spandrel
is well in biology or for real in architecture. But
please explain. Okay, Well, Stephen J. Gould um coined the
term spandrel, as you point out in the article. Um,
(12:33):
and it's just perfect actually in this application, because the spandrel,
architecturally speaking, is um this triangular area that inevitably is
created when you put two arched domes next to another
at right angles, and it looks like if you're looking
at it looks like purposeful design, like ornamentation. But it's
actually a byproduct you can't get around. And that's what
(12:57):
a spandrel is. As far as Gould is concerned, the
product of another evolutionary process right and language supposedly was
as far as gold and chomp scare concern just kind
of came about as the result of other stuff, specifically toolmaking. Yeah,
Darwin calls it pre adaptation and later became acceptation. And
(13:19):
which one do you like more, pre adaptation or acceptation?
Acceptation is a little hard to say, so I'm gonna
go predation. It sounds so like important for us, you know. Um.
But a quick example of that, and this is the
one most often cited, is that, uh, there's a theory
out there that bird feathers were originally meant to keep birds, warm,
and flying came about after that as a spandrel makes sense.
(13:46):
Well's the problem exactly. So you said that our brains
adapted to where we could they got larger, to where
we could make tools, and things in language came about
because of the result of that. And this isn't just
kind of I mean, it's not like they're like, well,
we can run, so we can talk. Um. There's specific
(14:06):
areas of the brain that are associated with both toolmaking
and tool use and language. UM. And there's actually two.
There's um Broker's area and there's more. Nikki's area and
Broker's area was named after a French neurosurgeon named Paul Broca,
and in eighteen sixty one he um described the patient
(14:29):
named Tan. Tan wasn't the guy's real name. No one
knew his real name. Um. He was the only thing,
the only syllable he could pronounce that he could form
was Tan. So they're like, well, that's your name, pal Um.
And after he died, Brokea opened up his skull and
looked at his brain and found a huge lesion on
the area now named broke A's area, and that's come
(14:53):
to be associated with speech production. The weird thing about
Tan is he could understand spoken language. If you're Tan,
you look um, you look kind of Tan. I think
maybe you should stay out of the sun. He could
notice stay out of the sun. He wasn't There wasn't
anything wrong with him other than he could not produce speech. Well,
I bet he was really ticked off with his name.
(15:15):
Then I can say his Tan. They're like, we'll just
call you Tan, And he said he was probably like Nor, Yeah,
it's ignacious anything but Tan. Yeah. I mean, I I
imagine the guy probably was like, you know, half mad
by the time he died, just out of frustration. Well,
stroke patients. You know, my grandfather had a stroke and
tried to speak in his head. He was saying words,
(15:36):
but it would come out as gobbledygook and he would
get really frustrated. It was very sad. So now that
was your grandfather. So what it sounds like your grandfather
UM had a problem with was his were Nikki's Area. Yeah,
and that was named after a German neuro surgeon who
found that UM his patients who could speak but they
(15:56):
weren't making any sense, had lesions on the area now
known it is were Nicky's Area. So if you put
the two together, broke his area which is involved in
speech production, and we're Nikki's area, which is involved with
UM speech comprehension, language comprehension. You have normally talking people
like us. Yes, and we first saw we're Nikki's area.
(16:18):
I think it was Ricky, we're Nikki the guy, we're
Nikki's area, and broke his area. UM, and the temporal, parietal,
and UH occipital lobes of the brain physically connected for
the first time in Homo habilis or habilis. So wait,
what was it? What's that called where you examine sculls
(16:38):
to see if there was probably some brain there. UM.
I believe that it's called cranial indocasting. Nice, I think so.
So they think that UM that this This would make
a lot of sense if Homo habilis UM was the
first one to talk, because they also often associate Homo
habilis is the first one to use tools. Right, this
(16:59):
is this isn't question I found recently it's to come
under question that possibly UM the oldest tools, the older
one tools which are like UM scrapers, hammers, UM I
think brain crushers, right, basically just stone tools that are
used to like skin meat off a bone. They're like
two point three million years old. They think that they
(17:22):
might be slightly older than Homo habilists. Then the other
problem with linking language and humans and Homo habilis is
we're not we're not sure we're on habiliss same tree.
Oh yeah, But nonetheless, Homo habilist does have the cute
nickname a handyman. I've never heard that because he was
(17:42):
supposedly the first tool users, and that makes sense. Yeah,
it's better than Bob the Builder, but there's still that
that link right there between tool use and um language, right,
which they think is makes him in her much more
advanced than the Australia Eopithecus who came before homoobilist. So um,
(18:05):
the whole reason why this is important is because they're
trying to nail down where language first came about. And
if you subscribe to Gold and Chomsky, it just all
of a sudden it was there and people were talking
to each other. Yeah, it was like one one mutation
happened and then all of a sudden people were able
to speak and they were like, oh man, I've been
(18:26):
wanting to get some stuff off my chest for generations. Um,
if you listen to Pinker and Bloom or you know what,
I feel bad for Bloom. If you listen to Bloom
and Pinker, Um, I mean we know about that, don't we. Uh.
If you listen to Bloom and Pinker, then it took,
you know, a very long time for language to evolve,
and gradually by putting combinations together. The thing is Ghoul
(18:50):
before he died said you know what, there's not nearly
enough time for language to evolve. And what's more, if
there was some sort of gradual evolution of language, then
chimps should show some sort of propensity towards language. They do,
but apparently not in any way that any linguist who's
(19:13):
saying would it would call actual language the beginnings of language. Um,
it's communication, but not actual language, right, like you mentioned
at the beginning of the article. Sure, but um, Bloom
and Pinker point out, So chimps and humans diverged about
six million years ago. That's three hundred thousand generations for
(19:33):
language to evolve. That's plenty of time, they say, and
Gould from beyond the Grace says, no, it's not as
he did. Okay, Uh, well you know what Pinker actually
said about that in his defense was look at the
high racks h y r a X. It is um
because people say, well, we see in the DNA the
(19:54):
high Racks shares the DNA with the African elephant. And
if you look at a higher because it looks like
a large rat, oh, it looks nothing like an elephant.
So he's like, just because you share all that DNA
doesn't mean that you're gonna evolve the exact same way. Yeah,
so that makes sense. Yeah, and some people pose and
(20:15):
I sort of agree that they're not mutually exclusive. You
don't have to have one without the other. Uh. It
may have been acceptation, and then from that point it
may have very much been a matter of natural selection
because the better you were communicating, the better you were surviving.
I like that idea too. Um. I don't think that though,
(20:36):
if you put Stephen Pinker in um Chomsky in the
same room that they would be like, you know this,
this all this works together. I think like they're tracing
it back to the origin point, the moment where it
began either as a either it began to evolve or
just appeared as a result of a incredibly sophisticated machine
(20:57):
that just started performing another function as a result of
its sophistication. And it's all kind of conjecture anyway, But
there's still I mean, there's still support. There's support for
different ones like UM, like brain plasticity, neural plasticity. The
fact that our our brains can be restructured and reorganized
supports the idea that language evolved gradually, right, and they
(21:18):
just started to build and building building, Possibly that's how
our brains became larger, right, chicken and the egg thing.
But people also say, like, if large brain equals things
like speech, then why don't like whales and things like
that with much larger brains and things like speech. That's
another great argument too, uh. And then mirror neurons UM
kind of lends support to the idea that it's just
(21:40):
it's just a spandrel of brain function because toolmaking and
UM and speech both used the same areas, right, and
then both um and then toolmaking lights up when you
watch somebody use tools, and when you're using tools yourself
in the broker's area. Interesting, yeah, or friend, samir neurons
(22:01):
they're back. Have you got anything else? There's a lot
of scrippling over there. Oh yeah. So one of Chomsky's
big points is that, uh, that grammar or the language
is innate, which makes it biological not cultural. Okay, UM
is universal grammar, which is that like if he always
(22:24):
says that if if a Martian anthropologist came down and
studied all human languages, that they would he would reasonably
conclude that all of that information is based on an
internal structure rather than culture. Basically, um and the the
key to universal grammar supposedly is recursion, which is like
(22:45):
me saying, like, I'm gonna go to the store, the
one down the street, you know, the one that has
the really good hot dogs. I'll be back in a
little bit. It's taking um. It's adding phrases within phrases.
There's no other um. There's no other community cation in
any animal species that would include this, which makes that human.
And supposedly all human languages contain recursion. Except there's a
(23:08):
challenger now called Paraha. It's Amazonian. There's like five people
who speak it, really, five hundred and one, including the
one um M I T trained linguist who studied it
for thirty years, is the only one who knows it
who's now saying this thing. They don't have recursion, so
(23:30):
universal grammars wrong. Therefore Chomsky's whole thing is wrong. There's
a pretty cool article on Chronicle of Higher Education that's
worth reading called Angry Words. You know that's a big
deal right now, is disappearing languages. And I don't think
I think these people are As far as I got
from the article, they seem like they are fine. There's
(23:52):
not that many of them, but they're not being encroached
upon any further. I think they're protected. Interesting. They're just
kind of living out there their existence and doing their thing. Actually, no,
I'm Chomsky is in the bushes behind them with the blowgun.
Well that's that's all I got. That's good stuff. This
could have been like ten hours long. Yeah. Easy for
linguists out there, they're like, oh, what a broad overview.
(24:14):
That's exactly what this is like. Um, if you want
to learn more and you want to see this picture
of ringo start just as a caveman, you should read
the article written by one Charles W. Bryant called how
did Language Evolve? Uh? Type that into the search bar
at how stuff works dot com and it will bring
it up. Uh. And I said search bar. So it's
(24:34):
time for listening, mate, Josh, I'm gonna call this we
saved another life apparently again, Hey guys and Jerry, I
thought I would We'll say hey Matt. Since Matt's here today,
I thought it would tell you a little about how
your podcast has quite literally saved and changed my life.
I'm seventeen and living a small town of Galesburg, Illinois,
(24:58):
but consider myself a citizen of the world. Uh. From
when I was six months young ten years after Ghostbusters,
my family exactly, My family and I have traveled back
and forth from Illinois to Barcelona, Spain, every two years.
This last time back in the US, I fell in
love with your podcast and have listened almost religiously every
(25:19):
morning for almost three years. Then one day my faith
was solidified. While listening and walking my dog cheap Ee,
I crossed the street. I should probably c o a walking.
This guy's really hitting all the points here. Um, walking
with headphones is a dangerous thing. Uh. If one of
you died because of a headphone walking incident, I would
never forgive myself. Back to the story, A car was
(25:43):
unbeknownst to me, hurtling down the street at me, I
started crossing when all of a sudden buzz how flies
work had just begun. Remember the loud buzz. It really
flipped me out and I jumped backwards just as the
car flew by me. Oh no, it was Um, it
was from the fly remember help me? And he said
(26:04):
that scared him enough to jump back and didn't even
see the car. So we saved this dude and cheap ee,
which is pretty exciting. That was a while ago, but recently,
actually two days ago. You have changed the course of
the rest of my life. After listening to the Sauna
and Viking podcasts, I have fallen in love with Scandinavia
so much so that I'm going to be a foreign
(26:25):
exchange student in Finland for the entirety of next year.
That's awesome. So we inspired uh Noah to go to
Finland because of the SOUNDA and Viking casts enjoyed the
really so much love and many thanks. And that's from
Noah f F nice Noah Finster Finkelstein, that's his name
(26:48):
now it is um. Thanks for that. No, we're glad
you're alive. We hope you have a very good time
in Finland. Um and uh, we're glad cheap. He's doing
well too. I bet no one never comes back like
in a sinister way or now. I bet he loves
it so much that he's like, I'm here nice until
winter hits exactly. UM. If you we always love hearing
(27:12):
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(27:41):
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. With me is always this Charles W.
Chucker Bryant and uh that makes this stuff you should know?
(00:25):
Is your seat? Okay, Frank, the chair is letting me
down again. Yeah, he'll do that. Cher he recently fell
in with a bad crowd and I do too, from
the way he's making me said, So I'll just I'll
lean forward. He's become unreliable. Who is it that messes
with him? I don't know. Somebody who has no idea
(00:48):
how to sit in a chair properly. That's how you
need to get next, not just your own mic cover,
but your own chair. Yeah. I think it's a strickling
guy from tech stuff. It would be very cool as
if you had it lower down from the ceiling like
it was stored up there, and then hang like the
sort of damocles over everybody else's head while they were recording.
We'll look into that, Chuck. Have you ever heard of
(01:12):
a little place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yeah, okay,
go eggheads. UM. So M I T is like the hotbed,
the center of the linguistics field, among many other fields
I didn't know. Yeah. Um Noam Chomsky is there. UM.
(01:37):
And there's another guy whose name escapes me right now,
but he recently made some headlines because he, I guess,
got a grant and had his house wired with fish
I cameras in every room with really high tech audio
equipment to and from the moment his newborn son came
home to the age of five. This guy recorded ninety
(02:00):
thousand hours the whole five years of this kid's life. UM,
in an effort to see how language acquisition develops in children.
That's pretty cool, and this child specifically, it is very cool.
There's a really clumsily titled UM Fast Company article called
M I T. Scientists captures ninety thousand hours of video
(02:23):
of his son's first words Comma, grafs it, comma what
graphs it? He and then he grafts it. Yeah. The
editor was like, I'm going home, yeah exactly so UM.
But anyway, there's some video and some audio clips in
there where you can hear like this condensed like over
five years or over like a six month period. Or
something like that. That's like the kid going from like
(02:45):
gaga to water and you can hear it like evolve. Interesting.
Did they learn anything from that? I don't know if
they have quite yet. And plus I mean like this
is one child, but it's at the very least very
very interesting. Um. But the the idea that you can
learn something about the evolution of language and human beings
(03:07):
from language acquisition and children is a hotly contested idea. UM,
you wrote what I think is a very fine article. Thanks.
You did a good job with this. How did language evolve?
It was shorty you were talking about, though not how
we acquire language skills as as um kids, but as
a species. How did humans acquire language? Because we're the
(03:30):
only ones that can say things like this, But you
go to great lens to point out that we're not
the only ones that communicate. True, I wouldn't say great
links that sort of al It was like two or
three sentences, Sure animals communicate. Well, no, it is. It
is very true, and I think it was a good
thing to start off with because humans can often be
very um homocentric. You know, so you say birds chirp,
(04:00):
porpoises go right, Yeah, uh, there are community. We're the
only ones who converbialize. That's right, right, Yes, we talk words.
And we don't know exactly how this evolved for sure, because, um,
there's a problem when it comes to things like evolution.
There's not a ton of evidence. A lot of times
(04:21):
like hard evidence. Um, I read this one guy's paper.
There's a lot of papers on this. Yeah, this is
a really First of all, I want you to just
be very quiet. Do you hear that off in the
business the explosion? Yes, we're standing in the midst of
a mine field. Linguistics is a mine field, and they
(04:43):
love like linguistics. People really love language and talking about
it like and putting down people who disagree with them.
So we should tread lightly here, we should. Um. But
one guy's paper that I read today meets some university paper.
He said that ideally, if we're going to study something
like these neurological changes that happened in the brain, we
(05:04):
would have, um, a large number of petrified whole brains
representing lots of species over lots of time. But we
don't have that. Unfortunately, they're big gaps. Uh. And even
even even not taking into account gaps, we don't have
fossilized brains. Yeah, the closest thing we have is a
(05:27):
fossilized skull, which we can analyze and be like, well,
there is kind of room for a big enough brain
maybe for language. Yeah, what's that called cranial indocasting? I
think so, Um, that's a that's a good term for it.
And people won't even know if I'm wrong. Um. What
they do have a little bit of evidence on is
(05:47):
that the shape of our vocal tract um wasn't until
about a hundred thousand years ago, wasn't able to even
able to make um, the vocalizations of the modern speech sounds.
So it wasn't even possible, Although that doesn't necessarily mean
there wasn't language, because it just could have been a
(06:07):
much more primitive version of what evolved of grunts. Yeah, exactly,
and I did see someone. Even though that's all this
was poo pooed by most people. Uh, some people think
that spoken language of all from sign language, and that
our modern gestures are holdover from that, which I thought
was interesting, but most people go, now that's not true. Um.
(06:29):
I ran into another one. And what you're talking about, um,
for everybody listening, is called a proto language, and evidence
of a proto language supports one theory, which we'll talk
about in a minute. But um, one idea for proto
language is that we started talking using on a monopeia,
which would make snap crackling pop like the oldest words
(06:49):
on earth, you know. Um. But well, I guess we
should probably get into it now, Like what are there
basically two competing theories for how we whire the language
as a species? Right? Yeah? And I like both of them.
I noticed at the end You're like, why can't we
all just get along as far as linguistics go? Because
(07:09):
I'm not a linguist, and so I'm not gonna sit
here and poople and argue um because I'm not smart enough.
I don't know enough about it. But the first Josh
is um that we adapted to survive, so we learned
how to speak. Then that's kind of the simplest way
to say it. Um. The example I gave in here
is uh. And then we'll talk about who you know,
(07:33):
who are the leaders in this whole category that believed this?
But uh took took's hunting on the range on the
plains in the Savannah, and took took um thunder scares
away the deer, so Took Took goes hungry. So then
later on Took took his already maybe learned to grunt
(07:53):
about like the deer being being nearby to his buddy.
Who's his friend? Did we name every name my friend?
Oh more Morty. Yeah, so he's already learned how to
tell Morty that deer nearby, so shut up, right, because
Morty talks incessantly. Uh So, now all of a sudden,
he learns that thunder and bad weather might scare deer away,
(08:16):
so he goes hungry. So he learns now, I've got
to learn like what bad weather looks like coming in
and how to tell Morty, hey, pick up the paste, dude,
because bad weather is coming and we don't want to
go hungry again. So that was just one of the
stepping stones in evolving speech, right, And it is kind
of like, um, the the idea behind it is that
(08:38):
the speech evolved out of the combinations of these things,
like you're saying, yeah, so you put them together and
all of a sudden, huh that makes a lot of sense.
I'm able to describe some larger portion of the world
around us. Yeah, And that's got more complex. The language
had to like as they learn more things, right, like
we settled down and sure culture would have had like
(08:59):
a you jimpact on something like that. Yeah, and keeping
children alive apparently, like once we settled in villages, A
lot of people think that language really took a leap
forward because we had to, you know, keep the species
alive by protecting the kids. Um. I guess also the
idea that you could warn somebody about something, right that
(09:21):
isn't necessarily just something you could point at and be like,
you know, let's get out of here through gesture, something
maybe further away, something that you couldn't see right then,
that would that would lead directly to um to a
trait that was that led to survival, which is the
whole basis of natural selection, which means that people who
(09:42):
could do that would be able to go reproduce, and
that trait would survive and be passed along. And I
imagine reproduction and all needed its own language as well, right,
you know, I'm like, hey, mama, although in Quest for
Fire it pretty much just happened, didn't I haven't seen
that so long. I think that was the first movie
I ever saw in showtime and Yeah, there wasn't a
(10:04):
lot of words going on. It was like, you know,
the ladies are down by the river bending over, filling
up water buckets and or you know, water pods and
man comes along and just you know, takes care of business. Yeah?
Is that? Is that an ancient phrase? Takes care of business?
TCB YEA. So I remember Quest for Fire and another movie. Um,
(10:29):
we're out on showtime at about the same time a
movie is called Caveman and it started Ringo Star. Is
that his picture that is in this article? Yeah, don't
you like my caption? Yeah? That's I couldn't. I couldn't
tell just by looking at it, but um yeah, the caption,
I think is what gave it away. These were the
old days where I would like the highlight of my
week was writing really clever picture captain star articles. I
(10:50):
would go home and say, look at this one, Emily,
it's pretty good. Someone might get this joke. So there's
a production still of from Caveman of Ringo Star standing
there and the caption is this cave by Caveman gets
by with a little help from his friends, beautiful Matty
guest producer Mattie. Yeah, so that's adaptation theory that basically
(11:10):
we figured out that we could survive better and more
robustly by talking to one another, and language evolved in
fits and starts through there. Right. Yeah. And who who's
gradually I should say gradually? Yes? Um? And that's Stephen Pinker,
who's a great dude. Yeah. Pinker and Bloom in their
paper Natural Language and Natural Selection. Uh. I mean there
are a lot of people who agree with them and
(11:31):
have written quote unquote the book on this since then,
or several books. It's very dense subject. Makes my mind
melt a little bit. Um, and Pinker and Bloom basically say, uh,
this is the case. It makes sense. This is just
(11:52):
standard Darwinian natural selection. What's the problem. I don't have
a problem with it. Why doesn't everybody just get on board? Uh? Well,
because there's another competing theory, and there are all sorts
of sub theories, but these are the two big big daddies. Um,
and this is no nom Chomsky and um. Evolutionary biologists
(12:12):
Stephen Jay Gould, and they think that it was a
spandrel or an axaptation. So you know what a spandrel
is well in biology or for real in architecture. But
please explain. Okay, Well, Stephen J. Gould um coined the
term spandrel, as you point out in the article. Um,
(12:33):
and it's just perfect actually in this application, because the spandrel,
architecturally speaking, is um this triangular area that inevitably is
created when you put two arched domes next to another
at right angles, and it looks like if you're looking
at it looks like purposeful design, like ornamentation. But it's
actually a byproduct you can't get around. And that's what
(12:57):
a spandrel is. As far as Gould is concerned, the
product of another evolutionary process right and language supposedly was
as far as gold and chomp scare concern just kind
of came about as the result of other stuff, specifically toolmaking. Yeah,
Darwin calls it pre adaptation and later became acceptation. And
(13:19):
which one do you like more, pre adaptation or acceptation?
Acceptation is a little hard to say, so I'm gonna
go predation. It sounds so like important for us, you know. Um.
But a quick example of that, and this is the
one most often cited, is that, uh, there's a theory
out there that bird feathers were originally meant to keep birds, warm,
and flying came about after that as a spandrel makes sense.
(13:46):
Well's the problem exactly. So you said that our brains
adapted to where we could they got larger, to where
we could make tools, and things in language came about
because of the result of that. And this isn't just
kind of I mean, it's not like they're like, well,
we can run, so we can talk. Um. There's specific
(14:06):
areas of the brain that are associated with both toolmaking
and tool use and language. UM. And there's actually two.
There's um Broker's area and there's more. Nikki's area and
Broker's area was named after a French neurosurgeon named Paul Broca,
and in eighteen sixty one he um described the patient
(14:29):
named Tan. Tan wasn't the guy's real name. No one
knew his real name. Um. He was the only thing,
the only syllable he could pronounce that he could form
was Tan. So they're like, well, that's your name, pal Um.
And after he died, Brokea opened up his skull and
looked at his brain and found a huge lesion on
the area now named broke A's area, and that's come
(14:53):
to be associated with speech production. The weird thing about
Tan is he could understand spoken language. If you're Tan,
you look um, you look kind of Tan. I think
maybe you should stay out of the sun. He could
notice stay out of the sun. He wasn't There wasn't
anything wrong with him other than he could not produce speech. Well,
I bet he was really ticked off with his name.
(15:15):
Then I can say his Tan. They're like, we'll just
call you Tan, And he said he was probably like Nor, Yeah,
it's ignacious anything but Tan. Yeah. I mean, I I
imagine the guy probably was like, you know, half mad
by the time he died, just out of frustration. Well,
stroke patients. You know, my grandfather had a stroke and
tried to speak in his head. He was saying words,
(15:36):
but it would come out as gobbledygook and he would
get really frustrated. It was very sad. So now that
was your grandfather. So what it sounds like your grandfather
UM had a problem with was his were Nikki's Area. Yeah,
and that was named after a German neuro surgeon who
found that UM his patients who could speak but they
(15:56):
weren't making any sense, had lesions on the area now
known it is were Nicky's Area. So if you put
the two together, broke his area which is involved in
speech production, and we're Nikki's area, which is involved with
UM speech comprehension, language comprehension. You have normally talking people
like us. Yes, and we first saw we're Nikki's area.
(16:18):
I think it was Ricky, we're Nikki the guy, we're
Nikki's area, and broke his area. UM, and the temporal, parietal,
and UH occipital lobes of the brain physically connected for
the first time in Homo habilis or habilis. So wait,
what was it? What's that called where you examine sculls
(16:38):
to see if there was probably some brain there. UM.
I believe that it's called cranial indocasting. Nice, I think so.
So they think that UM that this This would make
a lot of sense if Homo habilis UM was the
first one to talk, because they also often associate Homo
habilis is the first one to use tools. Right, this
(16:59):
is this isn't question I found recently it's to come
under question that possibly UM the oldest tools, the older
one tools which are like UM scrapers, hammers, UM I
think brain crushers, right, basically just stone tools that are
used to like skin meat off a bone. They're like
two point three million years old. They think that they
(17:22):
might be slightly older than Homo habilists. Then the other
problem with linking language and humans and Homo habilis is
we're not we're not sure we're on habiliss same tree.
Oh yeah, But nonetheless, Homo habilist does have the cute
nickname a handyman. I've never heard that because he was
(17:42):
supposedly the first tool users, and that makes sense. Yeah,
it's better than Bob the Builder, but there's still that
that link right there between tool use and um language, right,
which they think is makes him in her much more
advanced than the Australia Eopithecus who came before homoobilist. So um,
(18:05):
the whole reason why this is important is because they're
trying to nail down where language first came about. And
if you subscribe to Gold and Chomsky, it just all
of a sudden it was there and people were talking
to each other. Yeah, it was like one one mutation
happened and then all of a sudden people were able
to speak and they were like, oh man, I've been
(18:26):
wanting to get some stuff off my chest for generations. Um,
if you listen to Pinker and Bloom or you know what,
I feel bad for Bloom. If you listen to Bloom
and Pinker, Um, I mean we know about that, don't we. Uh.
If you listen to Bloom and Pinker, then it took,
you know, a very long time for language to evolve,
and gradually by putting combinations together. The thing is Ghoul
(18:50):
before he died said you know what, there's not nearly
enough time for language to evolve. And what's more, if
there was some sort of gradual evolution of language, then
chimps should show some sort of propensity towards language. They do,
but apparently not in any way that any linguist who's
(19:13):
saying would it would call actual language the beginnings of language. Um,
it's communication, but not actual language, right, like you mentioned
at the beginning of the article. Sure, but um, Bloom
and Pinker point out, So chimps and humans diverged about
six million years ago. That's three hundred thousand generations for
(19:33):
language to evolve. That's plenty of time, they say, and
Gould from beyond the Grace says, no, it's not as
he did. Okay, Uh, well you know what Pinker actually
said about that in his defense was look at the
high racks h y r a X. It is um
because people say, well, we see in the DNA the
(19:54):
high Racks shares the DNA with the African elephant. And
if you look at a higher because it looks like
a large rat, oh, it looks nothing like an elephant.
So he's like, just because you share all that DNA
doesn't mean that you're gonna evolve the exact same way. Yeah,
so that makes sense. Yeah, and some people pose and
(20:15):
I sort of agree that they're not mutually exclusive. You
don't have to have one without the other. Uh. It
may have been acceptation, and then from that point it
may have very much been a matter of natural selection
because the better you were communicating, the better you were surviving.
I like that idea too. Um. I don't think that though,
(20:36):
if you put Stephen Pinker in um Chomsky in the
same room that they would be like, you know this,
this all this works together. I think like they're tracing
it back to the origin point, the moment where it
began either as a either it began to evolve or
just appeared as a result of a incredibly sophisticated machine
(20:57):
that just started performing another function as a result of
its sophistication. And it's all kind of conjecture anyway, But
there's still I mean, there's still support. There's support for
different ones like UM, like brain plasticity, neural plasticity. The
fact that our our brains can be restructured and reorganized
supports the idea that language evolved gradually, right, and they
(21:18):
just started to build and building building, Possibly that's how
our brains became larger, right, chicken and the egg thing.
But people also say, like, if large brain equals things
like speech, then why don't like whales and things like
that with much larger brains and things like speech. That's
another great argument too, uh. And then mirror neurons UM
kind of lends support to the idea that it's just
(21:40):
it's just a spandrel of brain function because toolmaking and
UM and speech both used the same areas, right, and
then both um and then toolmaking lights up when you
watch somebody use tools, and when you're using tools yourself
in the broker's area. Interesting, yeah, or friend, samir neurons
(22:01):
they're back. Have you got anything else? There's a lot
of scrippling over there. Oh yeah. So one of Chomsky's
big points is that, uh, that grammar or the language
is innate, which makes it biological not cultural. Okay, UM
is universal grammar, which is that like if he always
(22:24):
says that if if a Martian anthropologist came down and
studied all human languages, that they would he would reasonably
conclude that all of that information is based on an
internal structure rather than culture. Basically, um and the the
key to universal grammar supposedly is recursion, which is like
(22:45):
me saying, like, I'm gonna go to the store, the
one down the street, you know, the one that has
the really good hot dogs. I'll be back in a
little bit. It's taking um. It's adding phrases within phrases.
There's no other um. There's no other community cation in
any animal species that would include this, which makes that human.
And supposedly all human languages contain recursion. Except there's a
(23:08):
challenger now called Paraha. It's Amazonian. There's like five people
who speak it, really, five hundred and one, including the
one um M I T trained linguist who studied it
for thirty years, is the only one who knows it
who's now saying this thing. They don't have recursion, so
(23:30):
universal grammars wrong. Therefore Chomsky's whole thing is wrong. There's
a pretty cool article on Chronicle of Higher Education that's
worth reading called Angry Words. You know that's a big
deal right now, is disappearing languages. And I don't think
I think these people are As far as I got
from the article, they seem like they are fine. There's
(23:52):
not that many of them, but they're not being encroached
upon any further. I think they're protected. Interesting. They're just
kind of living out there their existence and doing their thing. Actually, no,
I'm Chomsky is in the bushes behind them with the blowgun.
Well that's that's all I got. That's good stuff. This
could have been like ten hours long. Yeah. Easy for
linguists out there, they're like, oh, what a broad overview.
(24:14):
That's exactly what this is like. Um, if you want
to learn more and you want to see this picture
of ringo start just as a caveman, you should read
the article written by one Charles W. Bryant called how
did Language Evolve? Uh? Type that into the search bar
at how stuff works dot com and it will bring
it up. Uh. And I said search bar. So it's
(24:34):
time for listening, mate, Josh, I'm gonna call this we
saved another life apparently again, Hey guys and Jerry, I
thought I would We'll say hey Matt. Since Matt's here today,
I thought it would tell you a little about how
your podcast has quite literally saved and changed my life.
I'm seventeen and living a small town of Galesburg, Illinois,
(24:58):
but consider myself a citizen of the world. Uh. From
when I was six months young ten years after Ghostbusters,
my family exactly, My family and I have traveled back
and forth from Illinois to Barcelona, Spain, every two years.
This last time back in the US, I fell in
love with your podcast and have listened almost religiously every
(25:19):
morning for almost three years. Then one day my faith
was solidified. While listening and walking my dog cheap Ee,
I crossed the street. I should probably c o a walking.
This guy's really hitting all the points here. Um, walking
with headphones is a dangerous thing. Uh. If one of
you died because of a headphone walking incident, I would
never forgive myself. Back to the story, A car was
(25:43):
unbeknownst to me, hurtling down the street at me, I
started crossing when all of a sudden buzz how flies
work had just begun. Remember the loud buzz. It really
flipped me out and I jumped backwards just as the
car flew by me. Oh no, it was Um, it
was from the fly remember help me? And he said
(26:04):
that scared him enough to jump back and didn't even
see the car. So we saved this dude and cheap ee,
which is pretty exciting. That was a while ago, but recently,
actually two days ago. You have changed the course of
the rest of my life. After listening to the Sauna
and Viking podcasts, I have fallen in love with Scandinavia
so much so that I'm going to be a foreign
(26:25):
exchange student in Finland for the entirety of next year.
That's awesome. So we inspired uh Noah to go to
Finland because of the SOUNDA and Viking casts enjoyed the
really so much love and many thanks. And that's from
Noah f F nice Noah Finster Finkelstein, that's his name
(26:48):
now it is um. Thanks for that. No, we're glad
you're alive. We hope you have a very good time
in Finland. Um and uh, we're glad cheap. He's doing
well too. I bet no one never comes back like
in a sinister way or now. I bet he loves
it so much that he's like, I'm here nice until
winter hits exactly. UM. If you we always love hearing
(27:12):
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