Stuff You Should Know - How did language evolve?

Episode Date: May 1, 2012

" Sure animals talk in their own way, with chirps and grunts and the like, but only humans can form words. It is this, some evolutionary psychologists contend, that is what truly separates us from the rest of the species on the planet. But why us?" Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know. Is your seat okay?

Frank, the chair is letting me down again. Yeah, he'll do that. He recently fell in with a bad crowd. I do too from the way he's making me sit. Yeah. So I'll lean forward. He's become unreliable. Who is it that messes with him?

I don't know. Somebody who has no idea how to sit in a chair properly. That's what you need to get next, not just your own mic cover, but your own chair. Yeah, I think it's a Strickland guy from Tech Stuff. You know, it'd be very cool if you had it lower down from the ceiling, like it was stored up there. Yeah. And it'd hang like the sort of Damocles over everybody else's head while they were recording. I would love that. We'll look into that.

All right. Chuck. Yes. Have you ever heard of a little place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Yeah, sure. It's cool. Okay. Yeah.

Go eggheads. So MIT is like the hotbed, the center of the linguistics field among many other fields. I didn't know that. Yeah. Noam Chomsky is there. Oh, well, that don't make sense then. And there's another guy whose name escapes me right now, but he recently made some headlines because he, I guess, got a grant and had his house wired with fisheye cameras.

Awesome. In every room with really high-tech audio equipment too. And from the moment his newborn son came home to the age of five, this guy recorded 90,000 hours. Wow. The whole five years of this kid's life in an effort to see how language acquisition develops in children. That's pretty cool. And this child specifically.

It is very cool. There's a really clumsily titled, fast company article called, MIT scientist captures 90,000 hours of video of his son's first words, comma, graphs it. Comma what? Graphs it. He then he graphs it. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. That's so clumsily titled. The editor was like, I'm going home. Yeah, exactly. So, but anyway, there's some video and some audio clips in there where you can hear like this condensed like over five years or over like a six month period or something like that. That's like the kid going from like Gaga to water. Yeah.

You can hear it like evolve. Interesting. Did they learn anything from that? I don't know if they have quite yet. And plus, I mean, like this is one child. Yeah, sure. But it's at the very least very, very interesting. Yeah.

But the idea that you can learn something about the evolution of language in human beings from language acquisition in children is a hotly contested idea. It is. You wrote what I think is a very fine article. Thanks. You did a good job with this. How did language evolve? It was a shorty.

You were talking about though, not how we acquire language skills as kids, but as a species. How did humans acquire language? Because we're the only ones that can say things like this. Yeah. But you go to Great Lakes to point out that we're not the only ones that communicate. True. I wouldn't say Great Lakes. Those sort of clumsy intro.

It was like two or three sentences. Sure. Animals communicate. Well, no, it is. It is very true. I think it was a good thing to start off with because humans can often be very homocentric. True. You know?

Yeah, yeah. So you say Bert's chirp. Chirp. Porpoises go eeee. Right? Yeah. They are communicating. We're the only ones who can verbalize. That's right.

Right? Yes. We talk words. And we don't know exactly how this evolved for sure because there's a problem when it comes to things like evolution. There's not a ton of evidence a lot of times. I know. Like hard evidence.

I read this one guy's paper. There's a lot of papers on this. Yeah, this is a really, first of all, I want you to just be very quiet. Do you hear that off in the distance? The explosion? Yes. We're standing in the midst of a minefield. Linguistics is a minefield.

And they love linguistics. People really love language and talking about it. And putting down people who disagree with them. Yeah. So we should tread lightly here. We should. But one guy's paper that I read today, some university paper, he said that ideally,

if we're going to study something like these neurological changes that happen in the brain, we would have a large number of petrified whole brains representing lots of species over lots of time. Right. But we don't have that. No. Unfortunately, there are big gaps. Yeah.

And even not taking into account gaps, we don't have fossilized brains. Yeah. The closest thing we have is a fossilized skull. Sure. Which we can analyze and be like, well, there is kind of room for a big enough brain maybe for language. Yeah. What's it called?

Craneal Endocasting. Nice. I think so. That's a lot. That's a good term for it. And people won't even know if I'm wrong. What they do have a little bit of evidence on is that the shape of our vocal tract wasn't, until about 100,000 years ago, wasn't even able to make the vocalizations of the

modern speech sounds. Oh, yeah? So it wasn't even possible, although that doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't language because it just could have been a much more primitive version of what evolved. Of grunts? Yeah, exactly. And I did see someone, even though I saw this as poo food by most people, some people think that spoken language evolved from sign language and that our modern gestures are

a holdover from that, which I thought was interesting, but most people go, nah, that's not true. I ran into another one and what you're talking about for everybody listening is called a proto-language. Yeah. And evidence of a proto-language supports one theory, which we'll talk about in a minute. But one idea for a proto-language is that we started talking using onomatopoeia, which would make snap, crackle, and pop like the oldest words on Earth, you know?

Yeah. But, well, I guess we should probably get into it now. Like, what are, there are basically two competing theories for how we acquire language as a species, right? Yeah, and I like both of them. I noticed at the end, you're like, why can't we all just get along as far as linguistics goes? Because I'm not a linguist and so I'm not going to sit here and poo poo and argue because

I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough about it. Okay. But the first, Josh, is that we adapted to survive so we learn how to speak. Right. Then that's kind of the simplest way to say it. The example I gave in here is, and then we'll talk about who, you know, who are the leaders in this whole category that believe this.

But Tuk-Tuk's hunting on the range, on the plains, in the savannah, and Tuk-Tuk, thunder scares away the deer. So Tuk-Tuk goes hungry. Right. So then later on, Tuk-Tuk has already maybe learned to grunt about like the deer being nearby to his buddy. Who's his friend? Did we name, ever name a friend?

Oh, Mort. Morty. Yeah. So he's already learned how to tell Morty that deer nearby. So shut up. Right. Because Morty talks. He wants to, essentially.

Yeah. So now all of a sudden he learns that thunder and bad weather might scare deer away. So he goes hungry. So he learns, now I've got to learn what bad weather looks like coming in and how to tell Morty, hey, pick up the pace, dude, because bad weather's coming and we don't want to go hungry again. So that was just one of the stepping stones in evolving speech. Right.

And it's kind of like the idea behind it is that the speech evolved out of the combinations of these things like you're saying. Yeah. So you put them together and all of a sudden, huh, that makes a lot of sense. I'm able to describe some larger portion of the world around us. Yeah. And if that's got more complex, the language had to, like as they learned more things. Right.

Like we settled down and agriculture would have had like a huge impact on something like that. Yeah. And keeping children alive, apparently, like once we settled in villages, a lot of people think that language really took a leap forward because we had to, you know, keep the species alive by protecting the kids. I guess also the idea that you could warn somebody about something, right? Sure. That isn't necessarily just something you could point at and be like, you know, let's get out of here through gesture, something maybe further away, something that you couldn't

see right then, that would lead directly to a trait that led to survival. Yeah. Which is the whole basis of natural selection. Exactly. Which means that people who could do that would be able to go reproduce and that trait would survive and be passed along. And I imagine reproduction in all needed its own language as well. Right.

You know what I'm saying? Okay, mama. Although in quest for fire, it pretty much just happened. Did it? I haven't seen that in so long. I think that was the first movie I ever saw on Showtime. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of words going on. It was like, you know, the ladies are down by the river, bending over, filling up water buckets or, you know, water pods.

Okay. And man comes along and just, you know, takes care of business. Gotcha. Yeah. Is that an ancient phrase, takes care of business? TCB, yeah. So I remember quest for fire and another movie were out on Showtime at about the same time. This movie is called Caveman and it starred Ringo Starr.

Is that his picture that is in this article? Yeah, don't you like my caption? Yeah, that's it. I couldn't, I couldn't tell just by looking at it. But yeah, the caption I think is what gave it away. These are the old days where I would like the highlight of my week was writing really clever picture captions to articles. I would go home and say, look at this one, Emily.

It's pretty good. Someone might get this joke. So there's a production still of, from Caveman of Ringo Starr standing there and the caption is, this cave by Caveman gets by with a little help from his friends. Beautiful. So that gets produced from any snorkel to that. Yeah. So that's adaptation theory that basically we figured out that we could survive better

and more robustly by talking to one another and language evolved in fits and starts through there. Right. Yeah. And who's gradually, I should say gradually. Yes. And that's Steven Pinker, who's a great dude. Yeah. Pinker and Bloom in their paper, Natural Language and Natural Selection.

I mean, there are a lot of people who agree with them and have written quote unquote, the book on this since then. Oh yeah. Or several books. Yeah. It's very dense subject. Yeah. Makes my mind melt a little bit.

And Pinker and Bloom basically say, this is the case. It makes sense. Mm-hmm. This is just standard Darwinian natural selection. What's the problem? The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff.

Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed.

They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. How's that New Year's resolution coming along? You know, the one you made about paying off your pesky credit card debt and finally starting to save a retirement. Well, you're not alone if you haven't made progress yet. Roughly four in five New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or two.

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Listen to How to Money on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't have a problem with it. Why doesn't everybody just get on board? Well, because there's another competing theory and there are all sorts of sub theories, but these are the two big, big daddies. And this is Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Steven J. Gould. And they think that it was a spandrel or an acceptation. So, you know what a spandrel is?

Well, in biology or for real? In architecture. Yeah. Please explain. Okay. Well, Steven J. Gould coined the term spandrel as you point out in the article. Yeah. And it's just perfect actually in this application because a spandrel, architecturally speaking, is this triangular area that inevitably is created when you put two arch domes next to one another at right angles. Right. And it looks like, if you're looking at it, it looks like purposeful design,

like ornamentation. Sure. But it's actually a byproduct you can't get around. And that's what a spandrel is as far as Gould is concerned. It's the product of another evolutionary process. Right. Yeah. And language supposedly was, as far as Gould and Chomsky are concerned, just kind of came about

as the result of other stuff, specifically toolmaking. Yeah. Darwin calls it pre-adaptation and later became acceptation. And which one do you like more? Pre-adaptation or acceptation? Acceptation is a little hard to say. So I'm going to go with pre-adaptation. But it sounds so like important. But a quick example of that, and this is the one most often cited, is that there's a theory

out there that bird feathers were originally meant to keep birds warm and flying came about after that as a spandrel. Makes sense. Sure. What's the problem? Exactly. So you said that our brains adapted to where we could, they got larger to where we could make tools and things, and language came about because of the result of that.

And this isn't just kind of, I mean, it's not like they're like, well, we can run so we can talk. There's specific areas of the brain that are associated with both toolmaking and tool use and language. And there's actually two, there's Broca's area and there's Wernicke's area. And Broca's area was named after a French neurosurgeon named Paul Broca. And in 1861, he described a patient named Tan. And Tan wasn't the guy's real name, no one knew his real name. Was he Tan?

The only thing, the only syllable he could pronounce that he could form was Tan. So they're like, well, that's your name, pal. And after he died, Broca opened up his skull and looked at his brain and found a huge lesion on the area now named Broca's area. And that's come to be associated with speech production. The weird thing about Tan is he could understand spoken language. If you're like, Tan, you look kind of Tan, I think maybe you should stay out of the sun. He could know to stay out of the sun.

There wasn't anything wrong with him other than he could not produce speech. Boy, I bet he was really ticked off with his name then. And if all he can say is Tan, they're like, we'll just call you Tan. And he had said he was probably like, no. Right. Yeah. It's Ignatius. Anything but Tan.

Yeah. I mean, I imagine the guy probably was like, you know, half mad by the time he died. Sure. He was out of frustration. Well, stroke patients, you know, my grandfather had a stroke and tried to speak. In his head, he was saying words, but it would come out as a gobbledygook. And he would get really frustrated. It was very sad.

So now that was your grandfather? Yeah. So what it sounds like your grandfather had a problem with was his Wernicke's area. Yeah. And that was named after a German neurosurgeon who found that his patients who could speak, but they weren't making any sense, had lesions on the area now known as Wernicke's area. So if you put the two together, Broca's area, which is involved in speech production, and Wernicke's area, which is involved with speech comprehension, language comprehension,

you have normally talking people like us. Yes. And we first saw Wernicke's area. I think it was Ricky Wernicke. Wernicke's area and Broca's area and the temporal parietal and occipital lobes of the brain physically connected for the first time in Homo habilis or habilis. So wait, what was it? What's that called where you examine skulls to see if there was probably some brain there?

Um, I believe that is called cranial endocasting. Nice. I think so. So they think that this would make a lot of sense if Homo habilis was the first one to talk, because they also often associate Homo habilis as the first one to use tools. Right. This is in question, I found. Oh, really?

Recently, it's to come under question that possibly the oldest tools, the Aldewan tools, which are like scrapers, hammers. I think brain crushers. Right. Basically just stone tools that are used to like skin meat off a bone. They're like 2.3 million years old. They think that they might be slightly older than Homo habilis. Wow.

Then the other problem with linking language and humans and Homo habilis is we're not 100% sure we're on habilis's same tree. Oh, really? Yeah. But nonetheless, Homo habilis does have the cute nickname, a handyman. I've never heard that either. Because he's supposedly the first tool users. That makes sense.

Yeah. It's better than Bob the Builder. Yeah. But there's still that link right there between tool use and language. Right. Which they think makes him and her much more advanced than the Australiaopithecus who came before Homo habilis. Right.

So the whole reason why this is important is because they're trying to nail down where language first came about. Right. And if you subscribed to Gould and Chomsky, it just all of a sudden was there and people were talking to each other. Yeah. It was like one mutation happened and then all of a sudden people were able to speak. Yeah.

And they were like, oh, man, I've been wanting to get some stuff off my chest for generations. Right. If you listen to Pinker and Bloom, or you know what? I feel bad for Bloom. If you listen to Bloom and Pinker, I mean, we know about that, don't we? Yeah. If you listen to Bloom and Pinker, then it took a very long time for language to evolve and gradually by putting combinations together.

The thing is, Gould, before he died, said, you know what, there is not nearly enough time for language to evolve. Right. And what's more, if there was some sort of gradual evolution of language, then Choms should show some sort of propensity toward language. Well, they do, though. They do, but apparently not in any way that any linguist who's sane would call actual language the beginnings of language.

Right. It's communication, but not actual language. Right. Like you mentioned at the beginning of the article. Sure. But Bloom and Pinker point out, so Choms and humans diverged about six million years ago. Right. That's 300,000 generations for language to evolve.

That's plenty of time, they say. Sure. And Gould from Beyond the Grace says, no, it's not. Is he dead? Yeah. Okay. Well, you know what Pinker actually said about that in his defense was, look at the high racks, H-Y-R-A-X.

It is because people say, well, we share 98% of the DNA. The high rack shares 98% of the DNA with the African elephant. And if you look at a high rack, it looks like a large rat. Oh, yeah. It looks nothing like an elephant. So he's like, just because you share all that DNA doesn't mean that you're going to evolve the exact same way. Yeah.

So that makes sense. Yeah. And some people pose, and I sort of agree, that they're not mutually exclusive. Yes. You don't have to have one without the other. It may have been acceptation. And then from that point, it may have very much been a matter of natural selection because the better you were at communicating, the better you were at surviving.

Right. I like that idea. I do, too. I don't think that though, if you put Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky in the same room, that they would be like, you know, this all, this works together. Sure. I think like they're tracing it back to the origin point, the moment where it began, either as a, it began to evolve or just appeared as a result of an incredibly sophisticated

machine that just started performing another function as a result of its sophistication. And it's all kind of conjecture anyway. But there's still, I mean, there's still support. There's support for different ones like brain plasticity, neuroplasticity. The fact that our brains can be restructured and reorganized supports the idea that language evolved gradually, right? And it just started to build and build and build. Possibly that's how our brains became larger.

Right. Chicken and the egg thing. But people also say like if large brain equals things like speech, then why don't like whales and things like that with much larger brains have things like speech. That's another great argument, too. And then mirror neurons kind of lend support to the idea that it's just, it's just a spandrel of brain function because toolmaking and speech both use the same areas. Right.

Oh yeah. And then both, and then toolmaking lights up when you watch somebody use tools and when you're using tools yourself in the Broca's area. Interesting. Yeah. Our old friends, the mirror neurons. Yeah, they're back. You got anything else?

I bet you do. There's a lot of scribbling over there. Oh yeah. So one of Chomsky's big points is that that grammar or that language is innate, which makes it biological, not cultural. Okay. Is universal grammar, which is like if he always says that if a Martian anthropologist came down and studied all human languages, he would reasonably conclude that all of that information

is based on an internal structure rather than culture, basically. And the key to universal grammar supposedly is recursion, which is like me saying like, I'm going to go to the store, the one down the street, you know, the one that has the really good hot dogs, I'll be back in a little bit. It's taking, it's adding phrases within phrases. Right. There's no other, there's no other communication in any animal species that would include this, which makes that human and supposedly all human languages contain recursion, except there's a

challenger now called Paraha, it's Amazonian, there's like 500 people who speak it. 501, including the one MIT trained linguist who studied it for 30 years is the only one who knows it, who's now saying this thing, they don't have recursion. So universal grammar is wrong. Therefore Chomsky's whole thing is wrong. There's a pretty cool article on Chronicle of Higher Education that's worth reading called Angry Words. Are they trying to save that language?

That's a big deal right now is disappearing languages. I don't think, I think these people are, as far as I got from the article, they seem like they are fine. There's not that many of them, but they're not being encroached upon any further. I think they're protected. Interesting. And they're just kind of living out their existence and doing their thing. Actually, Num Chomsky is in the bushes behind them with the blowgun.

The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff.

Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid for it.

Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. How's that New Year's resolution coming along? You know, the one you made about paying off your pesky credit card debt and finally starting to save a retirement? Well, you're not alone if you haven't made progress yet. Roughly four in five New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or two. But that doesn't have to be the case for you and your goals. Our podcast, How to Money, can help. That's right.

We're two best buds who've been at it for more than five years now. And we want to see you achieve your money goals. And it's our goal to provide the information and encouragement you need to do it. We keep the show fresh by answering listener questions, interviewing experts, and focusing on the relevant financial news that you need to know about. Our show is chock full of the personal finance knowledge that you need with guidance three times a week. And we talk about debt payoff. If let's say you've had a particularly spend thrift holiday season,

we also talk about building up your savings, intelligent investing, and growing your income. No matter where you are on your financial journey, How to Money has got your back. Millions of listeners have trusted us to help them achieve their financial goals. Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, that's it. That's all I got. That's good stuff.

This could have been like 10 hours long. Yeah, easy. For linguists out there, they're like, oh, what a broad overview. That's exactly what this is. They're like, blah. If you want to learn more and you want to see this picture of Ringo Stardust as a caveman, you should read the article written by one Charles W. Bryant called How Did Language Evolve? Type that into the search bar at howstuffworks.com, and it will bring it up.

And I said search bar, so it's time for listening to me. Josh, I'm going to call this We Saved Another Life, apparently. Again. Hey, guys, and Jerry. I thought I would say, hey, Matt, since Matt's here today. Yeah, hey, Matt. I thought I would tell you a little about how your podcast has quite literally saved and changed my life.

I'm 17 and live in a small town of Galesburg, Illinois, but consider myself a citizen of the world from when I was six months young, 10 years after Ghostbusters. My family and I have traveled back and forth from Illinois to Barcelona, Spain every two years. This last time back in the US, I fell in love with your podcast and have listened almost religiously every morning for almost three years. Then one day, my faith was solidified. While listening and walking my dog, Chipe, I crossed the street. I should probably COA, walking. This guy's really hitting all the points here.

Walking with headphones is a dangerous thing. If one of you died because of a headphone walking incident, I would never forgive myself. Back to the story. A car was unbeknownst to me, hurtling down the street at me. I started crossing when all of a sudden, buzz, how flies work, had just begun. I remember the loud buzz. It really flipped me out and I jumped backwards just as the car flew by me. Oh, no, it was from the fly, remember?

Help me. Oh, that's right. And he said that scared him enough to jump back and didn't even see the car. Wow. So we saved this dude and Chipe, which is pretty exciting. That was a while ago, but recently, actually two days ago, you have changed the course of the rest of my life. After listening to the sauna and Viking podcast, I have fallen in love with Scandinavia so much so

that I'm going to be a foreign exchange student in Finland for the entirety of next year. That's awesome. So we inspired Noah to go to Finland because of the sauna and Viking cast. Enjoy the lily. So much love and many thanks. And that's from Noah FF. Nice. Noah Finster Finkelstein.

That's his name now. It is. Thanks for that. No, we're glad you're alive. We hope you have a very good time in Finland. And we're glad Chipe's doing well too. I bet no one never comes back. Like in a sinister way or?

No, I bet he loves it so much that he's like, I'm here. Nice. Until winter hits. That's exactly. But if you, we always love hearing how we've saved your life or enriched your life or something like that, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook, facebook.com, stuff you should know.

And you can email us directly just between us and like five other people who are included on the email at stuffpodcast at discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join HouseDefork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff.

Stuff that'll piss you off. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcast. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Borey and I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting ground breaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J, Quinta Brunson and so many more.

New episodes around every Tuesday, many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.