MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS PART III

LANGUAGE
At some point after chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor six million years ago, we developed the capacity to talk—and to gossip, argue, complain and pontificate. But because soft tissue like the vocal cords, larynx, tongue, uvula and brain are not preserved in the fossil record, we don't know when our ancestors evolved the physical capacity to make speech or how long it took to develop.

Other animals can communicate—the alarm calls of prairie dogs to warn of a nearby predator, say, or the meowing of a hungry cat to tell its owner to put food down. But they lack the complexity and grammar of language. And how babies develop the capacity has been thoroughly debated without clear resolution. Maybe humans have an inborn "universal grammar," as Noam Chomsky asserts, or maybe it emerges as part of the general processing of our big brains and the surrounding culture.

In her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Languages (Viking 2007), Christine Kenneally asked several key researchers if a boatload of babies landed on a desert island, would they develop language? Almost all agreed that they would develop some form of communication, but they disagreed if a fully formed, "normal" language would emerge.