Syntactic language and its consequences

One particularly notable anatomical difference distinguishes the fully modern humans of the past 50,000 years from both the archaic hominins, such as the Neanderthals, outside Africa and the archaic humans in Africa.

But the ability to make all manner of vocal sounds does not by itself transform communication. Syntactical capacity is the essential accompani­ment. To confer an advantage that outweighed the increased danger of choking to death, the new vocal tract configuration must largely have coevolved with the cerebral hardwiring for full syntactic language. The evolution of that hardwiring would have selected for the survival and reproduction of those who could best exploit its communicative potential - those who were able to create and articulate the widest range of different meaning-bearing combinations of sounds - the vast number of words and other meaning units that have come to characterize human language.

From the physiological perspective, the precise timing of this evolutionary changeover in pronunciation capacities, and of the probable associated development of full syntactic language, remains uncertain. Diagnostic skel­etal materials from the crucial period in Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago are lacking thus far. But there are suggestive indications in the archaeological record that, in broad terms, this evolutionary change was underway by around 70,000 bce.

Why is full syntactic language so crucial to the emergence of fully modern humans, the ancestors of us all? Acquiring the full capacities for syntactic language conferred on our common ancestors the ability to build abstract interpretive structures for dealing with other people and with the world around them and to conceive of things not physically experienced and not seen, and to imaginatively build structures of meaning for coming to terms with factors beyond human control.

This is not to say that there was no verbal communication among earlier hominins and among archaic humans. But there is a chasm of difference between the ability these groups might have possessed to make utterances - even a large range of distinct utterances - that communicated things seen or actions taken, and the ability of fully modern humans to put words and thus ideas together in the endless variety that the capacity for syntax allows. Syntax is essential to being able to abstract; to classify things and experiences; and to organize one's knowledge and, from the patterns or the lack of pattern, to conceive the possibility of other things not immediately present. Possessing syntactic language allowed humans to think about, and to talk with each other about, the surrounding conditions of their lives. Because fully syntactic language allows logical sorting, it allows for planning, for thinking ahead to consequences, for organizing and carrying out cooperative activities, for conceiving of novel things and novel relations among things, for categorizing, and for formulating ideas about the meaning of one's existence.

Possibly most important of all, the possession of full syntactic language engendered a new scale of social cooperative abilities. It allowed for the conceptualizing and formalizing of kinship relations as a basis for building up larger territorial social groupings of people and for structuring networks of cooperative relations among those groupings. The size of the local bands and the networks of reciprocal relations among bands in the Later Stone Age and the Upper Palaeolithic contrasts sharply with the very small size of residential groups, hardly more than nuclear families, among Neanderthals. Fully syn­tactic language gave fully modern humans the potential to form cooperative networks operating over distances not possible earlier. They could form larger-sized local groups as well as wider cooperative networks, which in turn allowed for more efficient exploitation of their environments. Once the full Later Stone package had emerged, these capacities, time and again, would have given the advantage to fully modern humans in their encounters with their archaic contemporaries.

One particular demographic event may be associated with the establish­ment of the capabilities for full syntactic language. Geneticists have found that the total population of the ancestors of all of us living today passed through a bottleneck, shrinking to under 10,000 individuals in all, and possibly as low as 1,000 breeding pairs, sometime in the millennia surround­ing 70,000 bce. The archaeologist Stanley H. Ambrose has proposed that a particular natural event, the great eruption around 72,000 bce of the Toba volcano in Indonesia, may have caused this bottleneck.^[427] This eruption, the most massive in millions of years, brought several years of volcanic winter to tropical climes in southern Asia and dumped volcanic ash as far west as Africa.

But one can also view a population bottleneck as a contingent effect of the evolution of the capability for full syntactic language.

From this perspective the population bottleneck through which the ances­tors of all modern humans passed can be understood as a consequence rather than a cause of the acquisition of the new abilities. This solution does not rule out the possibility of climatic stress, such as volcanic winter, as a contributing factor in consolidating or accelerating those evolutionary pro­cesses. The archaeological transition to the Later Stone Age seems, after all, to have begun around 68,000 bce, close in time to the Toba eruption.

The linguistic evidence that still remains to us from the formative eras of full syntactic language favors the conclusion that all present-day languages descend either from a single original language or, probably more correctly, from a cluster of mutually evolving, mutually interacting original dialects.^[428] That kind of linguistic history has a particular demographic implication: It indicates that the transition from the oral communication systems of earlier, archaic humans to full syntactic language as we know it took place in a relatively compact, geographically contiguous cluster of interacting, related communities. A population for our common ancestors of under 10,000 individuals, and possibly as few as 1,000 breeding pairs, meets that condition.

The earliest human languages would have differed in some ways from most languages spoken today. It seems, for example, that the early fully modern humans, as they experimented and grew more and more aware of their capacities, created an elaborate consonant system, with possibly as many as a hundred or more consonants. The predominant, although not universal, trend in language history since then has been toward decreasing the number of consonants. This trend appears in the phonological histories of many language families of the world. It also has an interesting long-term consequence: Although there are certainly exceptions, the overall historical tendency has been a decrease in the complexity of consonant systems the farther our human ancestors moved from our common African homeland.^[429] The most complex consonant systems today tend to occur in the eastern and southern African regions, in which our fully modern human ancestors first emerged. One of the simplest systems of all, with eight consonants, occurs in Hawaiian, as far out in the Pacific as one can get from Africa.

The earliest human languages also probably put in use an elaborate set of demonstratives. Modern English has, basically, just two demonstratives, this and that.^[430] But many languages today have much more complex systems. Some possess different demonstratives for up to four distances, distinguish­ing, for example, “this right here," “this nearby," “that,” and “that far away,” along with perhaps a separate demonstrative for “that spoken about.” Other languages may use a variety of different demonstrative words, with the choice of demonstrative depending not just on where the thing referenced is located, but also on where the person addressed is located relative to the object and to the person who is speaking.^{[431] [432]} A goodly number of the same ancient demonstrative root words recur again and again across the languages of the world, many more than would be required by a simple system such as the English one. Their presence in languages from southern Africa to Asia to South America indicates that they go back to the original era of human language and that early human language most likely possessed a system of demonstratives similar to some of the complex systems that still exist today. 1⁹