Table of Contents
ENTRANCE HALL: BECOMING DIFFERENT
Sara | 6,000,000 Years Ago | Generation 0
Harun | 5,999,928 Years Ago | Generation 6
Alisa | 4,500,000 Years Ago | Generation 125,000
Yikin | 3,200,000 Years Ago | Generation 233,333
Anne | 3,000,000 Years Ago | Generation 250,000
Mahasti | 2,700,000 Years Ago | Generation 275,000
Ling | 2,400,000 Years Ago | Generation 300,000
Ng’ula | 2,100,000 Years Ago | Generation 325,000
Shoichi | 1,800,000 Years Ago | Generation 350,000
Iskuhi | 1,799,925 Years Ago | Generation 350,005
Gärd | 1,799,870 Years Ago | Generation 350,010
Dakila | 1,799,805 Years Ago | Generation 350,015
Capac | 1,550,000 Years Ago | Generation 361,550
Taranga | 1,549,930 Years Ago | Generation 361,555
Olatunde | 900,000 Years Ago | Generation 419,250
To the people who made the Babel’s Dawn blog better than I could:
The many commenters who forced me into a wider perspective and taught me many things I needed to learn about language. And Laura Newman, who saved the blog by showing me a way to keep at it without going mad from exhaustion.
A CONFESSION
WHEN IT COMES to natural history, I prefer museums to books. It’s not that I don’t love books, but getting from the printed facts of natural history to their breathing truth can often be a bit of a slog, especially when compared with the way a museum sets the visitor down in front of fossils displayed in active positions or dioramas—stages with painted backdrops and three-dimensional figures—depicting lost worlds. Looking at those exhibits, the meaning of the facts pops out at you. So when I began work on my own volume about the natural history of speech origins, the idea of museum displays nestled easily into my head.
Babel’s Dawn is organized to help readers pretend they are strolling through a series of museum galleries filled with dioramas that display scenes from the origins of speech. It begins with the last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees (from about six million years ago) and proceeds on down to the first storytellers (a bit more than a hundred and fifty thousand years ago). Naturally, I have imagined a modern museum, and when visitors arrive in the entrance hall they are handed devices called audio guides, complete with headphones. Besides pretending that you are looking at scenes in dioramas, pretend that you are listening to an audio guide that provides the facts and ideas connecting the displays. It is that simple.
So let’s tour my natural history museum’s exhibition on the origins of speech . . .
ENTRANCE HALL: BECOMING DIFFERENT
LIKE ALL SCIENCE stories, this one begins with wonder. Over the centuries, many people have noticed an infinite chain of language acquisition. We learned to talk from our parents, who learned from their parents, who learned from their parents—but how did that chain begin? Asked in modern, Darwinian terms, we know that our ape ancestors did not speak, so there must have been a time when members of the human lineage began speaking without learning it from their parents. How did they do that?
Against a wall stands a wax figure of Samuel Johnson, famous as the author of the first great dictionary of the English language. He wears an eighteenth-century wig and a cheap frock coat. Behind him, written on the wall, is a quotation from one of his famous conversations.
Johnson, like many people, tried to explain the birth of language as a miracle, proposing that language began as a product of divine inspiration. The wall quotation reads:
