Linguist Daniel L. Everett Discusses Origins of Language at Science Book Talk

Daniel L. Everett, a linguist who also serves as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University, introduced his newest book and discussed the origins of language to a crowd of more than 200 in the Science Center Wednesday evening.

The conversation on topics covered in Everett’s book, “How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention,” is part of a series of science-related book talks coordinated by the Harvard Division of Science, Cabot Science Library, and the Harvard Bookstore.

The premise of his new work is that language predates Homo sapiens, tracing back to Homo erectus.

Everett hypothesized that as long as the Homo genus has had the ability to create complex tools, communication has been necessary.

“[Tools] have symbolic and social components. They go beyond the functionally necessary, they go into style that represents one tradition over another,” he said.

He also said tools are evidence of culture, which in turn suggests the presence of language.

“You can’t have a language unless you have a culture, and you can’t have a culture unless you have a language,” Everett said.

Everett subscribes to the gradual theory of linguistics, the idea that spoken and written language developed over hundreds of thousands of years, rather than the saltationist one, which argues that the emergence of language occurred more suddenly.

“The evolution of the platforms for language and symbols took evolutionary time and are not limited to Homo sapiens,” he said. “You don't just get a creature that one day stands up and starts talking.”

Simge Topaloglu, a graduate student in psychology who attended the talk, said this differs from her viewpoint of how languages develop.

“It’s certainly a different approach to have language emerge — claiming that it emerged gradually over a million years or more as opposed to being attributed to a single mutation that possibly happened 50 to 60,000 years ago,” she said.

Even though the language of Homo erectus is less complex than the language of Homo sapiens, that does not necessarily make it less legitimate, Everett said.

He cited the lifestyle of Homo erectus to demonstrate that its language contained only what it needed to survive and to express itself, while pointing out that even some current languages do not have numbers and others do not have colors.

“How much grammar do you need to build a boat?” Everett said.

He added that the “simple” nature of the language of Homo erectus also is not necessarily indicative of its intelligence as a genus.

“You could say maybe [Homo erectus] had the intelligence of an eight-year old or 10-year old sapiens child,” he said. “No way to really know that, but let’s say they did — eight-year olds can talk a lot.”