“four of the world’s largest language groups: Uto-Aztecan, Indo-European, Bantu, and Austronesian”
“Researchers like Faisal think that as toolmaking skills became more common in the population, humans may have acquired the mental horsepower requisite for language. “A lot of people would say that toolmaking came [before language]—that’s the general prevailing view,” Uomini says. “I would just say that they co-evolved.””
“Kirby realized that this process of iterated learning—which depended on brain function but extended beyond it—went a long way toward explaining where language structure came from. Having watched in the lab as ordered languages appeared, he’s skeptical when he sees colleagues get entrenched in purely biological explanations for language’s origins. “There’s been this assumption that brain and behavior are related very simply, but languages emerge out of huge populations of socially embedded agents. The problem with ‘gene for x’ or ‘grammar module y’ is they ignore how something that is the property of an individual is linked to something that is the property of a community.””
“This linkage reveals the absorbing paradox at the heart of language’s origins. As hardwired as it is, language is a distributed object, both across the human brain and across generations of people. And it is precisely the chaotic hot-potato toss of words and grammar that yields the order and beauty that we see today. In the realm of language, as in other things, modern science is showing us that we are not the pilots of our own sealed ship, but are actors in a play, each able to contribute a verse.”