EIGHT
BRIDGES TO HUMAN LANGUAGE
The gulf between animal vocal communication and human speech has traditionally been viewed as unbridgeable. In fact, recent studies of animal vocalizations show some of them to be far more sophisticated than we had previously suspected. On the other hand, there are dozens of cases in which humans have been forced by exceptional social circumstances to create simplified languages, possibly illustrating two primitive stages in the evolution of human language. Thus, we are beginning to understand how our most unique and important distinction from animals nevertheless arose from animal precursors.
*
THE MYSTERY OF human language origins is the most crucial in understanding how we became uniquely human. After all, it is language that allows us to communicate with each other far more precisely than any animal can. Language enables us to formulate joint plans, to teach one another, and to learn from what others have experienced elsewhere or in the past. With it, we can store precise representations of the world in our minds, and hence encode and process information far more efficiently than any animal can. Without language we could never have conceived and built Chartres Cathedral – or V-2 rockets. For these reasons, I speculated in Chapter Two that the Great Leap Forward (the stage in human history when innovation and art at last emerged) was made possible by the emergence of spoken language as we know it.
Between human language and the vocalizations of any animal lies a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. It has been clear since the time of Darwin that the mystery of human language origins is an evolutionary problem: how was this unbridgeable gulf nevertheless bridged? If we accept that we evolved from animals lacking human speech, then our language must have evolved and become perfected with time, along with the human pelvis, skull, tools, and art. There must once have been intermediate language-like stages linking monkey grunts to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Darwin diligently kept notebooks on his children’s linguistic development, and reflected on the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples, in the hope of solving this evolutionary mystery.
Unfortunately, the origins of language prove harder to trace than the origins of the human pelvis, skull, tools, and art. All of the latter may persist as fossils that we can recover and date, but the spoken word vanishes in an instant. In frustration, I often dream of a time machine that would let me place tape-recorders in ancient hominoid camps. Perhaps I would discover that australopithecines uttered grunts little different from those of chimpanzees; that early Homo erectus used recognizable single words, progressing after a million years to two-word sentences; that Homo sapiens before the Great Leap Forward became capable of strings of words that were longer but still without much grammar; and that syntax and the full range of modern speech sounds arrived only with the Great Leap.
Alas, we have no such retrospective tape-recorder, and no prospects for ever getting one. How can we hope to trace speech origins without such a magic time machine? Until recently, I would have said that it was hopeless to do more than speculate. In this chapter, however, I shall try to draw on two exploding bodies of knowledge that may allow us to begin building bridges across the gulf between animal and human sounds, by starting from each of its opposite shores.
Sophisticated new studies of wild animal vocalizations, especially those of our primate relatives, constitute the bridgehead on the animal shore of the gulf. It has always been obvious that animal sounds must have been precursors of human speech, but only now are we beginning to sense how far animals have come towards inventing their own ‘languages’. In contrast, it has not been clear where to locate the bridgehead on the human shore, since all existing human languages seem infinitely advanced over animal sounds. Recently, though, it has been argued that a numerous set of human languages neglected by most linguists truly exemplifies two primitive stages on the human side of the causeway.
*
Many wild animals communicate with each other by sounds, of which bird-songs and the barking of dogs are especially familiar to us. Most of us are within earshot of some calling animal on most days of our lives. Scientists have been studying animal sounds for centuries. Despite this long history of intimate association, our understanding of these ubiquitous and familiar sounds has suddenly expanded because of the application of new techniques: use of modern tape-recorders to record animal calls, electronic analysis of the calls to detect subtle variations imperceptible to the unaided human ear, broadcasting recorded calls back to animals to observe how they react, and observing their reactions to electronically reshuffled calls. These methods are revealing animal vocal communication to be much more like language than anyone would have guessed thirty years ago.
The most sophisticated ‘animal language’ studied to date is that of a common, cat-sized African monkey known as the vervet. Equally at home in trees and on the ground in savannah and rainforest, vervets are among the monkey species that visitors to East African game parks are most likely to see. They must have been familiar to Africans for the hundreds of thousands of years that we have existed as the species Homo sapiens. They may have reached Europe as pets over 3,000 years ago, and they certainly have been familiar to European biologists exploring Africa since the Nineteenth Century. Many laypeople who have never visited Africa are still acquainted with vervets from visits to the zoo.
Like other animals, wild vervets regularly face situations in which efficient communication and representation would help them to survive. About three-quarters of wild vervet deaths are caused by predators. If you are a vervet, it is essential to know the differences between a martial eagle, one of the leading killers of vervets, and a white-backed vulture, an equally large soaring bird that eats carrion and is no danger to live monkeys. It is vital to act appropriately when the eagle appears, and to tell your relatives. If you fail to recognize the eagle, you die; if you fail to tell your relatives, they die, carrying your genes with them; and if you think it is an eagle when it is really just a vulture, you are wasting time on defensive measures while other monkeys are safely out there gathering food.
Besides these problems posed by predators, vervets have complex social relationships with each other. They live in groups and compete for territory with other groups. Hence it is also essential to know the difference between a monkey intruding from another group, an unrelated member of your own group likely to push you, and a close relative in your own group on whose support you can count. Vervets that get into trouble need ways of telling their relatives that they, and not some other monkey, are in trouble. They also need to know and communicate about sources of food: for instance, which of the thousand plant and animal species in the environment are good to eat, which are poisonous, and where and when the edible ones are likely to be found. For all these reasons, vervets would profit from efficient ways of communicating about and representing their world.
Despite these reasons, and despite the long and close association between vervets and humans, we had no appreciation of their complex world knowledge and vocalizations until the mid-1960s. Since then, observations of vervet behaviour have revealed that they make finely graded discriminations among types of predators, and among each other. They adopt quite different defensive measures when threatened by leopards, eagles, and snakes. They respond differently to dominant and subordinate members of their own troop, differently again to dominant and subordinate members of rival troops, differently to members of different rival troops, and differently to their mother, maternal grandmother, sibling, and unrelated members of their own troop. They know who is related to whom: if an infant monkey calls, its mother turns towards it, but other vervet mothers turn instead towards that infant’s mother to see what she will do. It is as if vervets had names for several predator species and several dozen individual monkeys.
The first clue to how vervets communicate this information came from observations that the biologist Thomas Struhsaker made on vervets in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. He noted that three types of predator triggered different defensive me
asures by vervets, and also triggered alarm calls sufficiently distinct that Struhsaker could hear the differences even without making any sophisticated electronic analysis. When vervets encounter a leopard or any other species of large wild cat, male monkeys give a loud series of barks, females give a high-pitched chirp, and all monkeys within earshot may run up a tree. The sight of a martial or crowned eagle soaring overhead causes vervets to give a short cough of two syllables, whereupon listening monkeys look up into the air or run into a bush. A monkey who spots a python or other dangerous snake gives a ‘chuttering’ call, and that stimulates other vervets in the vicinity to stand erect on their hind legs and look down (to see where the snake is).
Beginning in 1977, a husband-and-wife team named Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney proved that these calls really had the different functions suggested by Struhsaker’s observations. Their experimental procedure was as follows. Firstly, they made a tape-recording of a monkey giving a call whose apparent function Struhsaker had observed (say, the ‘leopard call’). Then, on a later day, after locating the same troop of monkeys, either Cheney or Seyfarth hid the tape and loudspeaker equipment in a bush nearby, while the other started filming the monkeys with a cine or video camera. After fifteen seconds, one of the two scientists broadcast the tape while the other kept filming the monkeys for one minute to see whether the monkeys behaved appropriately for the call’s suspected function (for example, whether the monkeys ran up a tree on hearing a broadcast of the supposed ‘leopard’ call). It turned out that playback of the ‘leopard call’ really did stimulate the monkey to run up a tree, while the ‘eagle call’ and ‘snake call’ similarly stimulated monkeys into behaviour that seemed to be associated with these calls under natural conditions. Thus, the apparent association between the observed behaviour and the calls was not coincidental, and the calls did have the functions suggested by observation.
The three calls that I have mentioned by no means exhaust a vervet’s vocabulary. Besides those loud and frequently given alarm calls, there appear to be at least three fainter alarms that are given less frequently. One, triggered by baboons, causes listening vervets to become more alert. A second, given in response to mammals like jackals and hyenas that prey on vervets only infrequently, causes the monkeys to watch the animal and perhaps move slowly towards a tree. The third faint alarm call is a response to unfamiliar humans and results in the vervets quietly moving towards a bush or the top of a tree. However, the postulated functions of these three fainter alarm calls remain unproven because they have not yet been tested by playback experiments.
Vervets also utter grunt-like calls when interacting with each other. Even to scientists who have spent years listening to vervets, all these social grunts sound the same. When the grunts are recorded and displayed as a frequency spectrum on the screen of a sound-analysing instrument, they look the same. Only when the spectra were measured in elaborate detail could Cheney and Seyfarth detect (sometimes but not always!) average differences between the grunts given in four social contexts: when a monkey approaches a dominant monkey, when it approaches a subordinate monkey, when it watches another monkey, or when it sees a rival troop.
Broadcasts of grunts recorded in these four different contexts caused monkeys to behave in subtly different ways. For example, they looked towards the loudspeaker if the grunt had originally been recorded in the ‘approach dominant monkey’ context, while they looked in the direction towards which the call was being broadcast if it had originally been recorded in the ‘see rival troop’ context. Further observations of the monkeys under natural conditions showed that the natural calls had also been eliciting this subtly different behaviour.
Vervets are much more finely attuned than we are to their calls. Merely listening to and watching vervets, without recording and playing back their calls, gave no hint that they had at least four distinct grunts – and may have many more. As Seyfarth writes, ‘Watching vervets grunt to each other is really very much like watching humans engaged in conversation without being able to hear what they’re saying. There aren’t any obvious reactions or replies to grunts, so the whole system seems very mysterious – mysterious, that is, until you start doing playbacks.’ These discoveries illustrate how easy it is to underestimate the size of an animal’s vocal repertoire.
*
The vervets of Amboseli have at least ten putative ‘words’: their words for ‘leopard’, ‘eagle’, ‘snake’, ‘baboon’, ‘other predatory mammal’, ‘unfamiliar human’, ‘dominant monkey’, ‘subordinate monkey’, ‘watch other monkey’, and ‘see rival troop’. However, virtually every claim of animal behaviour suggesting elements of human language is greeted with scepticism by many scientists, who are convinced of the linguistic gulf separating us from animals. Such sceptics consider it simpler to assume that humans are unique, and that the burden of proof should be borne by anyone who thinks otherwise. Any claim of language-like elements for animals is considered a more complicated hypothesis, to be dismissed as unnecessary in the absence of positive proof. Yet the alternative hypotheses by which the sceptics instead attempt to explain animal behaviour sometimes strike me as more complicated than the simple, and often plausible, explanation that humans are not unique.
It seems a modest claim to propose that the different calls which vervets give in response to leopards, eagles, and snakes actually refer to these animals or are intended as communications to other monkeys. However, sceptics were disposed to believe that only humans could emit voluntary signals referring to external objects or events. The sceptics proposed that the vervet alarm calls were merely an involuntary expression of the monkey’s emotional state (‘I’m scared out of my wits!’) or of its intent (‘I’m going to run up a tree’). After all, those explanations apply to some of our own ‘calls’. If I saw a leopard coming at me, I too might emit a reflex scream even though there was no one around with whom to communicate. We grunt as a reflex when we throw ourselves into some physical activities, such as lifting a heavy object.
Suppose that zoologists from an advanced civilization in outer space observed me to give a trisyllabic scream, ‘argh, leopard’, and to climb a tree, when I saw a leopard. The zoologists might well doubt that my lowly species could express anything beyond grunts of emotion or intent – certainly not symbolic communications. To test their hypothesis, the zoologists would resort to experiments and detailed observations. If I screamed regardless of whether any other human was in earshot, that would support the theory of a mere expression of emotion or intent. If I screamed only in the presence of another person, and only when approached by a leopard but not by a lion, that would suggest a communication with a specific external referent. And if I gave the scream to my son but remained silent when I saw the leopard stalk a man with whom I had frequently been seen to fight, the visiting zoologist would feel certain that a purposeful communication was involved.
Similar observations convinced earthling zoologists of the communicative role of vervet alarm calls. A solitary vervet chased by a leopard for nearly an hour remained silent throughout the whole ordeal. Mother vervets give more alarm calls when accompanied by their own offspring than by unrelated monkeys. Vervets occasionally give the ‘leopard call’ when no leopard is present but when their troop is fighting with another troop and losing the fight. The fake alarm sends all combatants scrambling for the nearest tree and thereby serves as a deceptive ‘time out’. The call is clearly a voluntary communication, not an automatic expression of fear at the sight of a leopard. Nor is the call a mere reflex grunt given in the act of climbing a tree, since a calling monkey may either climb a tree, jump out of a tree, or do nothing, depending on the circumstances.
The supposition that the call has a well-defined external referent is especially well illustrated by the ‘eagle call’. Among large, broad-winged, soaring hawks, vervets usually respond with the eagle call to the martial eagle and the crowned eagle, their two most dangerous avian predators. They usually do not respond to the tawny
eagle, and almost never to the black-chested snake eagle and white-backed vulture, which do not prey on vervets. Seen from below, black-chested snake eagles look rather similar to martial eagles in their shared pale underparts, banded tail, and black head and throat. Hence vervets rate as good bird-watchers. Their lives depend on it!
Vervet alarm calls are not an involuntary expression of either fear or intent. They have an external referent that may be quite exact. They are finely targeted communications which are more likely to be given honestly if the caller cares about the listener, and which may also be given dishonestly to enemies.
Sceptics dispute proposed analogies between animal sounds and human speech on the additional grounds that human speech is learned, but that many animals are born with the instinctive ability to utter the sounds characteristic of their species. However, young vervets appear to learn how to utter and respond to sounds appropriately, just as human infants. The grunts of an infant vervet sound different from those of an adult. ‘Pronunciation’ gradually improves with age until it becomes virtually adult at about the age of two years, somewhat less than half the age for vervet puberty. That is like human children attaining adult pronunciation at the age of five years; my sons, who are almost four years old, are still sometimes difficult to understand. Infant vervets do not learn to give reliably the correct response to an adult’s call until the age of six or seven months. Until then, an adult’s snake alarm call may send the infant jumping into a bush, the correct response to an eagle but a suicidal response to a snake. Not until the age of two years does the infant consistently emit each alarm call in the correct context. Before that age, the young vervet may call ‘eagle!’ not only when a martial or crowned eagle goes overhead, but also when any other bird flies over, and even when a leaf flutters down from a tree. Child psychologists refer to such behaviour in our own children as ‘overgeneralizing’ – as when a child greets not just dogs but also cats and pigeons with ‘bow-wow’.