Abstract
This paper argues that the origins of language can be detected one million years ago, if not earlier, in the archaeological record of Homo erectus. This controversial claim is based on a broad theoretical and evidential foundation with language defined as communication based on symbols rather than grammar. Peirce’s theory of signs (semiotics) underpins our analysis with its progression of signs (icon, index and symbol) used to identify artefact forms operating at the level of symbols. We draw on generalisations about the multiple social roles of technology in pre-industrial societies and on the contexts tool-use among non-human primates to argue for a deep evolutionary foundation for hominin symbol use. We conclude that symbol-based language is expressed materially in arbitrary social conventions that permeate the technologies of Homo erectus and its descendants, and in the extended planning involved in the caching of tools and in the early settlement of island Southeast Asia.
Highlights
Language is biocultural behaviour (Darwin 1871; Sapir 1927; White 1940; Deacon 1997; Tomasello 2005; Christiansen et al 2009; Fitch 2010; Arbib 2018); research into its origins is necessarily an interdisciplinary exercise
We examine the early archaeological record for evidence of socially constructed conventions with a focus on the Acheulean of Africa and Eurasia from about one million years ago onwards when conventional tool forms become a recurrent feature of the archaeological record
The first position opens the door to the roots of language with Homo erectus or its descendants, and the second suggests the foundations for symbol making were widespread among other hominins, with the possibility that language evolved independently more than once
Summary
Language is biocultural behaviour (Darwin 1871; Sapir 1927; White 1940; Deacon 1997; Tomasello 2005; Christiansen et al 2009; Fitch 2010; Arbib 2018); research into its origins is necessarily an interdisciplinary exercise. The split lies along deep philosophical fault lines that separate Platonists— who believe in universal or innate ideas shared by all humans (Defez 2013)—and the Aristotelian view of language as an inherently cultural phenomenon, learned in social contexts from a young age (Corballis 2002; Tomasello 2005, 2014; Everett 2016, 247ff) and based on neurobiological capacities for acquiring language (see Tallerman and Gibson 2012 for a summary of a debate on language specific vs generalised biological structures for language learning) These contrasting positions formed the basis of discussions on the origins of language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The gradualist position lacks a figurehead and instead manifests itself in a variety of accretionary hypotheses including our semiotics-based position presented here
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