86 Before Agriculture
who spoke and those who did not may have been very small, a tiny fraction of the
total brain. But once it was there, a divide opened up between human beings and
all other animals, a divide that had immense and ever-expanding consequences.
Language allowed human evolution to take a very different and much more elab-
orate path.
In the absence of language, inheritance is limited to the gene pool. Parents pass
on to their offspring a bundle of genes and very little else. But with language, they
can pass on vast bodies of knowledge, moral codes, forms of social arrangement.
And with language, it is possible to think. With thought, it is possible for each
generation to transform knowledge and ideas, which are then passed on to the
generation that follows. Once it had language, the human species spread through-
out the world, from environment to environment, each group with its own ways
of occupying territory, knowing about their land and ordering their lives in a par-
ticular region. In this way humans came to live in cultures – that is, in many kinds
of articulate and organized societies.^12
The human mind is this combination of language, thought and culture. The
capacity to be human is inseparable from the capacity to think, be articulate and
change life through words. The best-trained chimpanzee and the least-educated
human being are far, far apart in linguistic skills. The one has nothing more than
a tiny number of words it can use in restricted conditions. The other has grammar,
syntax and hundreds of words that he or she can use in any circumstances. The
human mind, at its least, is rich with potential that makes human evolution unlike
anything else in history. All the mind’s capacities are shared by all humans, irre-
spective of any other consideration. Each culture may give rise to its own kind of
mind. But mind is what gives rise to culture itself.
10
No one knows when human beings first used language. Homo erectus, the human
ancestor who lived about 2 million years ago, used tools and has been declared by
some archaeologists to have had many qualities that are more human than animal.
But the kind of tools erectus used seem to have remained unchanged for about a
million years, and the structure of its upper body suggests that it did not have the
breathing system necessary for elaborate speech. As one scholar has put it: ‘If these
ancient people were talking to each other, they were saying the same thing over and
over again.’^13 The evidence that does suggest language, where the tool kit is com-
plex and changing and where the physiology of the upper body is consistent with
the use of speech, comes from about 800,000 years ago.
The dating of the acquisition of language, however, is less important in this
context than the nature of the process. Did language appear through a long and
gradual evolution, with lower levels of linguistic achievement giving way to higher
levels? Or was the ability to use language a more sudden, cataclysmic event, or set