The Meme Machine

THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE 89
appear? Did Lucy indulge in early social chit-chat? Did Homo habilis give
names to their tools and inventions? Did Homo erectus tell stories round their
fires?
No one knows for sure. Words do not leave fossils, and extinct languages
cannot be brought back. There are, however, a few clues. Some archaeologists
believe that we can deduce much about hominid language abilities from their
artefacts and burial practices. Only 100 000 years ago there occurred the Upper
Palaeolithic Revolution, a time of sudden (in archaeological terms)
diversification of hominid activity. For two million years or more the only
hominid artefacts had been simple stone tools, the stone flakes probably used as
choppers and scrapers by H. habilis, and hand-axes made by H. erectus. It was
not until the Upper Palaeolithic that H. sapiens began to leave behind evidence
of deliberate burial of the dead, simple painting and body adornment, trading
over long distances, increasing sizes of settlements and an extension of
toolmaking from stones to bone, clay, antlers and other materials. The view that
this dramatic change coincides with the sudden origins of fully developed
language is, according to Richard Leakey, common among archaeologists.
However, it is based only on speculation. Often our own thinking is so bound
by the language we learned as children it is almost impossible for us to speculate
accurately about what can and cannot be done in the way of art, toolmaking or
trading, with what level of language ability. We need better evidence than this.
More solid clues come from anatomy. The major increase in brain size, of
roughly 50 per cent, occurred during the transition from the australopithecines to
Homo. By half a million years ago H. erectus had brains nearly as big as ours.
Since we do not know the nature of the relationship between brain size and
language this cannot tell us when language appeared, but perhaps we can find
out something about the organisation of early brains. Obviously brains do not
fossilise, but their shape can be deduced from the inside of a fossilised skull.
One H. habilis skull apparently shows evidence of Broca’s area and of the
asymmetry characteristic of our language-lateralised brains which led some
people to conclude that H. habilis could speak. However, recent brain scan
studies of living humans show that Broca’s area is also active during skilled
hand movements and so cannot be definitive evidence for language. Its
development might be connected more to the stone tools made by that species.
Nicholas Toth of Indiana University has made a detailed study of early stone
tools and he and colleagues spent months learning to make them – not an easily
acquired skill as it turned out (Toth and Schick 1993). In the process they
discovered that most of the early stone tools were made by right-handed people.