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I must admit that the basic premise of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals—that human language was an outgrowth of Homo sapiens' natural propensity for singing and music-making—makes me a little itchy. When Mithen gives us a chapter subhead like "Nina Simone singing 'Feeling Good': Homo sapiens at Blombos Cave, wearing shell beads, painting their bodies and feeling good," I know he's just making the text reader-friendly. But this is the kind of idea that attracts many readers less because of its scientific coherence than because it's such a cool notion.
by Steven Mithen Harvard Univ. Press, 2006 384 pp., $25.95 |
Traditional analysis of our mental capacity for language depicts it in a coldly abstract manner couched in a user-unfriendly jargon, focused on obscure wrinkles in how we talk that strike the layman as dry and trivial, such as the fact that you can say Who do you think will say what? but not What who do you think will say? How much more appealing the idea that language actually piggybacked on something as warm, visceral, and social as music. And an evolutionary tale featuring jamming Neanderthals will find a ready audience even among many academics, happy to be exempted from dealing with the navel-gazing abstruseness of modern theoretical linguistics.
After all, the aforementioned savants have yet to present a scenario for how language could have emerged among a species that began without it. It's a tough nut to crack: listen to apes grunting, and then explain how to get from that to Oscar Wilde's "I can resist everything but temptation"—or even "Pass the salt." In these circumstances, we need as much fresh thinking as possible, and Mithen's is certainly that.
The usual idea is the intuitive one: that language began with words—Leopard! Ouch! and so on—and that gradually humans began putting the words together as sentences expressing more complex thoughts; i.e., grammar was born. But Mithen argues, on the contrary, that humans first communicated via little strings of syllables expressed with musical intonations, similar to animal calls. Indeed, Mithen thinks that people would have started by imitating such calls themselves, rather as if cavemen watched a pack of wolves hunting down an elk and started saying "ruffRUFFruff" among themselves when gathering to hunt down big game. After a while, ruffRUFFruff would come to "mean" Let's hunt. Animals such as birds and, more significantly, our closer relatives, monkeys, develop a considerable repertoire of calls to signify warning, fear, domination, submission, and so on; Mithen suggests that early humans did the same and then some.
The reader is to be pardoned if so far it sounds a little far-fetched that we ever got from here to We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union. But Mithen—drawing on work by University of Cardiff linguist Alison Murray—proposes a clever mechanism for doing just that. Imagine that when you wanted to tell someone to give something to a woman, you would warble tebima!, and that there was another warble, kumapi!, for when you wanted to tell someone to share something with a woman. Tebima and kumapi would not be "words" or "sentences" but just calls, like ruffRUFFruff. But then suppose a smart human noticed that both calls had -ma- in them, so that abstracted, ma could be taken to mean "her." Here would be the birth of a word. And then imagine that humans abstracted lots of words like this, and started combining them to express whole thoughts—maybe, for instance, something like ma ruff to mean she hunts.
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