Wild Voices: Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor, and the Emergence of Language
Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis. Current Anthropology Volume 58, Number 4, August 2017
Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners’ resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species’ first deceptive vocalizations were nonhuman animals. When our ancestors were vulnerable hominins equipped with limited weaponry, they kept predators away by increasing the range and diversity of their vocal calls. This led to choral singing, primarily by females, and deceptive mimicry of animal calls, primarily by scavenging and hunting males. A critical feature of our model is the core principle of reversal, whereby deceptive signals aimed originally by a coalition against an external target are subsequently redeployed for honest communicative purposes within the group. We argue that this dynamic culminated ultimately in gestural, vocal, and ritual metaphor, opening the way to word formation and the rapid emergence of grammar.
Why Do Only Humans Talk?
Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. So it must be at least part of our job to explain why it is that, out of 220 primate species, only humans talk. Speculative theories abound, but little agreement has been reached so far. In our view, a viable hypothesis should invoke well-understood evolutionary mechanisms; respect core aspects of hunter-gatherer ethnography, archaeology, and the fossil record of human evolution; and yield testable predictions. A good scientific theory should also be conceptually elegant. Here, we explore an entirely new explanation based on two closely linked principles—reversal and metaphor. A word of warning. The way we have constructed this article is novel, and we ask the reader not to be surprised that we conjoin a wide range of previously unconnected fields. Our basic idea is simple: using language is so closely bound up with everything else humans do—singing, ritual, kinship, economics, and religion—that no separate, isolable theory of its origins is likely to work. Our basic assumption is that words and grammar are means of navigating within a shared virtual world. Singing, dancing, and other forms of communal ritual are necessary to join people together in such ideal or imagined worlds. Since language is nota system for navigating within the physical or biological world, it follows that nonhuman primates—creatures whose existence is confined to the realm of brute facts, not institutional ones (Searle 1996)—will have no need for either words or grammar. In an evolving hominin species, we argue, language will not even begin to evolve unless ritual action has already begun to establish intensified levels of community-wide trust in association with a shared virtual domain.