The story of human evolution has\u00a0undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by males strutting, brawling and shagging, with females just along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.<\/p>\n
The origins of our species\u2019 exceptional communication skills constitutes one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate \u2013 notably the brain and the vocal tract \u2013 are soft and don\u2019t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been tossed into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem.<\/p>\n
Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is\u00a0compelling: language evolved in\u00a0parallel with caring for our \u201cunderbaked\u201d newborns, because looking after a creature as helpless as a\u00a0human baby on\u00a0the danger-filled plains of Africa required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication.<\/p>\n
The evidence to support Beekman\u2019s theory isn\u2019t entirely lacking, though a\u00a0lot of it is, necessarily, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies come out early \u2013 before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed.<\/p>\n
One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents \u2013 individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services \u2013 played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-cooked human children. Another is\u00a0that stone age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.<\/p>\n
Luckily, the reconfiguration of\u00a0the\u00a0head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more precise control over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more\u00a0sophisticated, alloparents \u2013 particularly grandmothers \u2013 used it\u00a0to\u00a0transmit their accumulated knowledge, thereby nurturing infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.<\/p>\n
Alas, Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She spends about half the book laying the\u00a0groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won\u2019t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she thinks, but only in our line \u2013 not in those of our closest relatives. \u201cWe may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,\u201d she writes, \u201cbut I don\u2019t think we had much to talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n
And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn\u2019t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line \u2013 the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia \u2013 she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job.Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Maybe, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn\u2019t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children; it\u2019s still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.<\/p>\n
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