Ritual and the Origins of Language
Knight, C. (1994). Ritual and the origins of language. In C. Knight & C. Power (eds), Ritual and the origins of symbolism. Two papers presented to the Human Evolution Interdisciplinary Research Unit conference on ritual and the origins of culture. London: University of East London Sociology Department, pp. 4-19.
THE NEANDERTHALS WERE PROBABLY DISPLACED, according to Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988: 6006), because they were “biologically provided with speech of more modest quality than modern humans.” Bickerton (1990; cf. Mellars 1991) extensively elaborates this theme, postulating “a single genetic event” which gave modern Homo sapiens the competitive edge, launching the human revolution by turning “protolanguage” into “syntacticized language”.
Neanderthals and modern humans
Such scenarios treat speech as unconditionally superior to alternative systems of communication. Darwinian theory, however, does not recognise superiority/inferiority in the abstract – only selection pressures. Speech involves not only benefits but potential costs; among these must be counted the dangers of excessively relying on uncorroborated information from others and – conversely – the risks of entrusting valuable information to others. “Tactical deception” theory (Byrne and Whiten 1988) would not predict such trust; within the terms of this paradigm, it is disturbingly anomalous. Humans undoubtedly possess specialised neurophysiological hard-wiring for sharing information via syntactical speech. This is a species-specific biological adaptation which – no less than stereopsis in monkeys or echolocation in bats – must have evolved through standard processes of Darwinian natural selection (Pinker and Bloom 1990). Postulating sudden macromutations is not Darwinism.
Nonhuman primates have homologues to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in which the internal connections broadly mirror the modern human configuration (Deacon 1987: 4; Steklis 1985). The endocast of a two million year-old Homo habilis specimen (KNM ER 1470) indicates a humanlike sulcal pattern in the region of Broca’s area (Falk 1992). Although the neocortex of Homo sapiens is 3 times the size predicted for nonhuman primates of the same body weight (Passingham 1975; see also Jerison 1973; Martin 1990: 361-396; Pilbeam and Gould 1974; Dunbar and Aiello 1993), this applies to archaic Homo sapiens as much as to anatomically modern humans. Differences in vascular structure and blood-flow may conceivably distinguish Neanderthal brains from their modern counterparts (Coppens 1981); yet studies of Neanderthal endocranial casts yield no evidence of radical inferiority (Holloway 1991).
It has been claimed that their supralaryngeal tract incapacitated Neanderthals from producing the range of vowel sounds central to modern speech (Lieberman and Crelin 1971; Lieberman 1985, 1989, 1991). But Falk long ago showed that Lieberman in his reconstruction of a classic Neanderthal had positioned the hyoid bone so high as to make swallowing impossible! The definitive position of this bone remained unknown until the discovery of a well-preserved Neanderthal at Kebara Cave, Israel (Arensburg et a1. 1989). Its hyoid was low as predicted by Falk, indicating a fully descended larynx like that of modern humans (Falk 1992).
Palaeontology, then, has been unable to corroborate the speech impediment theory of Neanderthal extinction. Neither does the artefactual record help. Excavations at Qafzeh, Israel (Vandermeersch 1981) have shown that for tens of millennia, early anatomically modern populations had a culture no more developed than that of their local Neanderthal contemporaries (Shea 1989). This and much other data suggests – as Soffer (1991: 13) has put it – “that our arguments about differential capacities of the two types of hominids are wanting”. By focusing on questions of capacity and totally ignoring the actualization of capacity into performance, she continues, “we have ignored the social contexts crucial to understanding habitual behavior, and thereby effectively sabotaged our understanding of what happened at the [Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic] transition”.