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Language Origins and Diversication

n April 12 in San Francisco, a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 400 people attended the third biennial Wattis Foundation Symposium in Anthropology, sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences and organized by Nina Jablonski. This years theme (Origin and Diversication of Language) brought eight international speakers together for discourse about the human capacity for communication. Topics ranged from animal communication to the spread of agriculture; participants ranged from linguists to prehistorians to cognitive psychologists. Peter Marler (UC-Davis) discussed how much we can learn about animal communication without necessarily understanding how it works. Vervet alarm calls, for example, are predatorspecic and playback experiments can dene these sounds in terms of its functional referent. What we do not know, however, is whether the alarm call itself is an appellation (leopard) that stimulates a reaction in the receiver, or a prescription for the action (climb up the tree) that the receiver reexively performs. Marler emphasized that although animals build call repertoires as they mature, they lack the capacity for lexical syntax, which underlies human language. Leslie Aiello (London) took an evolutionary perspective on the precursors of human language. She argued that as our ancestors became more cognitively developed and behaviorally exible, several factors acted in concert to promote a dynamic medium of communication rather than simply a long list of static vocalizations. These factors included group size and the need for social cohesion in the absence of time for manual grooming. Language, then, could be seen as an outgrowth of social grooming and one of many biobehavioral adaptations of a bipedal primate to a new social and ecological landscape.

Robert Martin (Zurich) continued the theme of neural evolution and focused on the importance of distinguishing cause from effect. In a wideranging review of primate biology and human evolution, Martin noted that many functional aspects of the brain, such as laterality, may be simply the effect of efficient neural processing in a large brain. In Martins view, overall brain size is best explained as a function of maternal basal metabolic rate, while social complexity correlates with neocortex size. Thus, it is the structure rather than the size of the human brain that may have been pivotal in language development. Martin suggested that language as we practice it is unique to anatomically modern humans, a point of view supported by several other symposium speakers. Alex Martin (NIMH) brought to the symposium latest research on the neural organization of semantic knowledge. Combining clinical studies of language aphasias with positron emission tomography (PET) scanning technology, Martin demonstrated that knowledge storage in general is widely distributed, but that knowledge categories, such as object form versus action (for example, hammer versus hammering), are sharply localized. The names for objects are encoded in areas of the brain specic to the semantic knowledge of their attributes. These areas, in turn, are different from the areas most active in language processing and production. Neurologically speaking, language is a complex pathway integrating visual pathways, physical attribute areas, premotor areas for activity knowledge, the limbic system, and memory areas affected by experience. Stephen Pinker (MIT) extended this cognitive perspective to the intriguing realm of language instinct. Although we cannot physically dissect the processing and production of language, we can model the mental faculties that

must be in place, or instinctive, in a linguistic species. These faculties include a mental directory, developed through experience, and a mental grammar, a set of rules for discrete combination of elements. Embedded within the language instinct are sophisticated referential assumptions that allow childrens rapid learning of a virtually innite range of possible expressions. Pinker observed that similar complex structures (such as the vertebrate eye) are always interpreted in terms of natural selection. What, then, might be the selective advantages to such a language instinct? Pinker speculated that human ancestors carved out an informavore niche in which the ability to remember and communicate knowledge of risks and resources would have selective currency. Paul Mellars (Cambridge) cautioned that the archeological record of human cultural evolution disproportionately focuses attention on the European Upper Paleolithic when the issue of language origins is raised. He agreed that the evidence for fully modern language in Aurignacian peoples is overwhelming, incorporating technology, subsistence, population size, and material evidence of symbolism. This rich prehistoric record does not imply limited linguistic capacity in anatomically modern people living outside of Europe at the same time, but it does speak to the linguistic capacity of the Neanderthal peoples who preceded Upper Paleolithic cultures in Europe. Mellars further argued that Neanderthal communication most likely lacked the key attributes of abstraction that enabled modern human culture to be as radically different and dynamic as the archeological record suggests. Johanna Nichols (UC-Berkeley) offered a linguists perspective on how languages diverge and disperse. Our ability to discern ancient language histories is hampered by a roughly 6,000-

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year-old fade-out time, or the depth to which grammatical and phonemic similarities between language families can be traced with conventional models of the rate of language transformation. Nichols noted that within this temporal umbrella some language families show extensive branching, while others are virtual isolates in the global catalogue. Shared grammatical constructs do not reveal how or why language families expand when they do, but they are a reliable indicator of relatedness in a system in which parallel traits are easily distinguished from homologous trait complexes. Colin Renfrew (Cambridge) brought the symposium to a close with a proposal for how and why languages have dispersed within the last 10,000 years. The spread of agriculture, he argued, was the dominant factor in the spread

of linguistic diversity. Language families that show little or no branching back to the fade-out time are probably remnants of preagricultural languages. On the other hand, languages that appear to have spread over time and space most likely tracked the spread of agriculture from the major zones of domestication. The different directions of spread in these zones, mediated by environmental conditions, effectively match the hypothesized directions of language spread over comparable periods of prehistoric time. The combination of speakers from several different research backgrounds made the symposium lively and informative. One theme supported by the panel as a whole was that the complex nature of language processing, combined with its innite potential for

expression, suggests that it is a faculty unique to anatomically modern humans, whose bio-cultural evolution over the last 50,000 years starkly contrasts that of the previous several million years. Although symbolic forms of communication were surely part of our hominid heritage, the linguistic capacity that we scrutinize today with lexicons and PET scanners is most likely a novel attribute of Homo sapiens. The proceedings of the symposium will be published in 1998 as a memoir of the California Academy of Sciences. Walter Carl Hartwig
Department of Basic Sciences San Francisco College of Osteopathic Medicine San Francisco, CA 94115

1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.