Read more: Instant Expert: The evolution of language
We may never be able to write a Neanderthal dictionary, but in the coming decades we should able to test ideas about the evolution of language
Each of the models of human protolanguages clearly has strengths and weaknesses. Contemporary theorists mix and match among the possibilities, and the truth will probably incorporate elements from each of these models. But since each model of protolanguage makes different predictions about when particular new capabilities appeared during the course of human evolution, they are in principle testable.
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Genetics provides the most exciting source of new evidence for the origins of language. DNA recovered from early human fossils allows us to estimate when particular mutations tied to particular aspects of language arose, and when studying more recent genetic changes, it is also possible to estimate the timing of evolutionary events by examining variation in modern humans.
Multiple genes have recently been linked to dyslexia, for example. Although dyslexia is identified by difficulties with learning to read, it often seems to result from some more fundamental problems with the way the sounds of language are processed. These genes may therefore be linked to the phonological components of language, which Darwin鈥檚 model would argue evolved early, but which Michael Arbib鈥檚 gestural model would predict to be latecomers.
In contrast, genes linked to autism lead to difficulties in understanding others鈥� thoughts and feelings: capacities linked to semantics. By Darwin鈥檚 model the normal human form of these genes should be latecomers, while in a gestural or lexical model they would have become involved in language at an earlier stage. Determining when human-specific variations of such genes arose in the human lineage may therefore allow us to test hypotheses about protolanguage directly.
So although we may never be able to write a Neanderthal dictionary, there is good reason to think that, as our data improves in the coming decades, we will be able to test ideas about human language evolution. The scientific study of language evolution appears to be coming of age.
Recommended reading
The Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin (c. 1871)
Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Language and Species by Derek Bickerton (Chicago University Press, 1990)
The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon (Norton, 1997)
Origins of the Modern Mind by Merlin Donald (Harvard University Press, 1991)
The Singing Neanderthals by Steven Mithen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
鈥淭he Language Faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?鈥� by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch,
鈥淣eural systems for vocal learning in birds and humans: a synopsis鈥� by Erich Jarvis,
鈥�The derived FOXP2 variant of modern humans was shared with Neanderthals鈥� by Johannes Krause and others,
W. Tecumseh Fitch
W. Tecumseh Fitch is professor of cognitive biology at the University of Vienna in Austria. He studied evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science and linguistics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, did his postdoc at MIT and has taught at Harvard University and the University of St Andrews in the UK. Fitch鈥檚 research focuses on the evolution of cognition and communication in vertebrates and includes human music and language. His book The Evolution of Language was published this year.