How Did We Learn to Talk? We Can’t Say for Sure.

THE LANGUAGE PUZZLE: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved, by Steven Mithen

If you stand on the rock of Edinburgh Castle on a clear day and look due north toward the Firth of Forth, you can make out the small island of Inchkeith, about three miles out to sea. It was to this island, in 1493, that James IV banished two infant children, with only a mute nurse for company, to be raised in silent isolation. The king hoped that, when the children came of age, this experiment would reveal the original, Edenic language of Adam and Eve, uncontaminated by modern chatter.

The results, let’s say, were inconclusive. An early historian, writing in Scots, offers contemporary gossip — “some sayis they spak goode hebrew” — before quickly disavowing any firm opinion on the matter.

This is just one of several near-identical language deprivation experiments reportedly carried out by various despotic rulers over the centuries. Many of these stories are probably apocryphal, but they point to an ongoing curiosity that is very real. Where did language first come from, and what was the first language like? These questions are addressed by archaeologist Steven Mithen in “The Language Puzzle.”

Speculation on the matter was so rife, and often so wild, that on March 8, 1866, the Société de Linguistique de Paris issued a set of statutes which notably declared that they would no longer enter into any communication concerning the origins of language. This ban has been credited with putting an ancient field of inquiry into hibernation for over a century — an exaggeration, perhaps, but one that carries a germ of truth.

Many scholars had come to realize that the question of how language had evolved was itself so inherently complex, and crossed so many of the specialist disciplines into which academia divides itself, that anyone claiming to have the answer was likely to be a quack.

Since the end of the last century, however, we have begun to see serious, multiple-component approaches to the topic that draw together evidence from different branches of learning. Mithen has a useful metaphor for the way in which the question must be tackled: The puzzle in his title is a jigsaw. The picture we are after, of language evolution, will only reveal itself if we place all the different pieces in the right configuration, bringing together evidence from linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology and ethology (the science of animal behavior).