Mind 103The earliest case that does address the nature of aboriginal rights, and which also bears on modern
cases, was decided in Southern Rhodesia in 1919. Judgment in this case introduced the notion
that you could have aboriginal people who roam and have no society, and therefore led to the
requirement that native litigants show they have an organized society. It was here that the idea that
human beings can be placed at different levels of an evolutionary ladder entered into modern
jurisprudence, with the attendant notion that some peoples are so low on this ladder – as evi-
denced by their way of ‘just wandering around’ – that they have no rights to lands or resources.
(See Dara Culhane’s The Pleasure of the Crown for these and other cases, especially chapter 6.)
9 The ‘organized society’ test depends on the idea that some humans are not humans. This is social-
scientific nonsense, of course, and originates in an attempt to justify expropriation on racial or
cultural grounds. At the end of the 20th century this was given the name ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a
new term for what many hunter-gatherers have long experienced.
10 Biologists spend a great deal of time testing the intelligence of many species, from rats and pigeons
to chimpanzees and parrots. Many forms and levels of intelligence are described as a result of this
research. But biologists who assess the achievements of animals in experimental tests, or measure
their speed and effectiveness at learning new skills, are not creating models of internal linguistic
abilities. It may be that some human actions that we believe arise from consciously made deci-
sions, processed in language, are more directly controlled by our genetic hard-wiring than we
would like to admit – though this is an area of ongoing contention. The central point is that what
happens with language, and therefore in the mind, pertains to a uniquely human form of intelli-
gence.
11 The observation on apes is from Derek Bickerton’s Language and Human Behaviour, p7. The
quote about noises from our mouths is from the first page of Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct.
12 A question arises in relation to the spread of humans across the world: what was the process that
resulted in so many different languages? Linguists have identified correlations between the length
of time a society is isolated from its neighbours and the evolution of a distinct language. By ana-
lysing vocabulary and grammar, it is possible to analyse links between peoples and even sequences
of movement. The human geographer James L. Newman has suggested that farming, by causing
people to settle in scattered but definite places, increased the degree of isolation between com-
munities. He uses this to explain the multiplicity of agricultural languages in, for example, much
of Africa (see his Peopling of Africa, especially p4).
Obviously hunter-gatherers settled in large territories giving rise to a language map with accord-
ingly large areas in which people speak the same language. But where one hunter-gatherer society’s
territories meet those of another hunter-gatherer society, languages differ – sometimes at the level
of dialect, sometimes at the level of language family. The boundary between Athabaskan and
Algonquian speakers in subarctic North America, for example, suggests deep conservatism with
regard to language, despite closely related economic systems. Similarly, a map of languages for the
North Pacific Coast would show great varieties of languages in relatively small regions. The region
that came to be California once contained approximately 80 different aboriginal languages. By
comparison, the spread of Indo-European languages is a homogenizing process resulting from
farming. It may be that when it comes to the variety of human languages, Newman has attributed
to agriculturalists some of the features of hunter-gatherers.
13 The quote comes from Desmond Clark of the University of California at Berkeley. It is cited in a
summary of the findings pertaining to Homo erectus and language in Robin McKie’s Ape/Man
(pp82–84). McKie reviews the evidence for the links between language and Homo Heidelbergien-
sis on pp122–124. In fact, the evidence he gives of humans who probably had language comes
from European sites. Much related evidence argues strongly in favour of the view that these lan-
guage users in Europe came from somewhere in Africa, and that their dispersal was itself a result
of speech. This means that the date of Heidelbergiensis is a very late date to use in pinpointing the
beginnings of language. The matter remains unresolved, but it would seem reasonable to say that
our ancestors made the evolutionary step necessary for language at least 1 million years ago.