The Language Puzzle: Read an excerpt from a book on the history of the spoken word

Just as we love words, we know their power and may fear their consequences. We know how a few ill-thought-out words can damage a relationship and flunk an interview; how eloquent politicians can sway a crowd; how words can abuse and offend; how words can rouse people to hatred, violence and war. We tolerate and suffer the consequences of such words because of our unbounded desire to talk and listen to what others have to say.

Your lexicon love affair began in childhood. Before reaching the age of one, you were likely saying your first words and knew the meaning of several hundred. Within your second year, you had started combining words into simple sentences while learning new ones at an average rate of nine a day. That rate continued unabated into your adolescence, maybe even learning two or more languages at once. How were you able to acquire language at such pace?

The answer is that you had your parents, carers, family and friends for help. You inherited a genetic predisposition to acquire language from your biological parents, which was realised by growing up amid people who were continuously using words, whether spoken or signed. Your parents had done likewise, helped by their own parents, family, friends and wider community. And so on, back through the generations. But how did it begin? And when?

A long time ago. It must have been after 6 million years ago, the date when we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Although there are word-like qualities to chimpanzee barks and grunts, these are insufficient to characterise their vocal communication as a form of language. Unlike tool making, walking on two legs and complex patterns of social relations, language has remained stubbornly aloof from the primate world, becoming the last bastion of human uniqueness. With no antecedent in the animal world, explaining how language began has become the mother of all puzzles.

We need to solve that puzzle to explain language today – how you can extract meaning from this sentence and (hopefully) tell others about the interesting article you are reading. Equally, we need to solve the language puzzle to know about our past. I suspect you have heard about the Neanderthals of the Ice Age, and Lucy who left her footprints in Tanzania 3.7 million years ago. Anthropologists describe their bones, archaeologists their tools and biologists can tell us about their genes. As fascinating as all that is, without knowledge about their language our ancestors will always remain ill defined, providing us with little understanding of the past. Did Lucy and the Neanderthals have words? If so, did they also have rules for how they could be strung together to make meaningful utterances? Or did they merely mumble and howl?

We need to know. Otherwise, our ancestors will forever remain as nothing more than subjects for scientific study rather than us viewing them as people from our past. Whenever language of the type we have today emerged, my proposition is that it enabled the most fundamental social, economic and cultural event of the human past: the origin of farming at c.10,000 years ago. That put an end to millions of years of hunting and gathering and was effectively the end of the Stone Age because metallurgy was soon discovered within the new farming communities.

The beginning of agriculture was not just the turning point of human history but also the crossroads for planet Earth. Farming rapidly led to towns and cities; ancient civilisations and empires soon followed; then came the industrial and digital revolutions, followed by globalisation. Marvellous things have been achieved – the music of Bach and men on the Moon. But the first farmers also ignited the slow-burning fuse of our present-day climate crisis and agriculture is responsible for extensive environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity.

Although the first farming communities are dated to 10,000 years ago, they were the outcome of a long, slow process of change in the way people thought about and acted in the world. That process began as soon as fully modern language evolved and was spurred on by climatic events that followed the peak of the last glaciation at 20,000 years ago. While archaeologists have focused on the impacts of climate change, they provide only half the story for the origin of farming. The other half is language, when it evolved and its impact on the human mind and behaviour. Without that we would still be living as Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

(Excerpted with permission from The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved, by Steven Mithen, published by Basic Books; 2024)