least one linguist (Lightfoot 1991) called for a reintroduction of the Paris
ban.
In fact,that ban was not ill motivated when it was first put into action.
The years immediately after publication of On the Origin of Specieswere
filled with pseudoevolutionary speculations.Fixating on the appearance
of the first words,steadfastly ignoring all that must have preceded and
followed this,scholars produced a series of baseless proposals that
survive today only as light relief in the introductory pages of some lin-
guistic textbooks:the first words came from grunts of pain,from work
chants,from imitations of the sounds of other species,from echoes that
objects gave out,from gestures made by the tongue,and so on (the take-
home message to students is,don’t even bother thinking about how
language began!).However,the situation has changed radically since the
nineteenth century.Rapidly accumulating knowledge in a variety of
convergent fields (ethology,paleoanthropology,neurology,evolutionary
biology,and linguistics being among the most important) has radically
reduced the problem space.These advances impose a series of rigorous
constraints on possible theories of language origins.We may even be
approaching a point at which only one among competing theories will
be compatible with the entire range of constraints.
Unfortunately,most researchers show little awareness of the full range
of knowledge that is now available.During the nineteenth century,
human behavior was divided up by the disciplines of the day in much the
same way as Africa was simultaneously being divided up by the colonial
powers.No surprise,the boundaries of these disciplines were often deter-
mined as arbitrarily and as illogically as were the boundaries of colonial
possessions.Consequently,many contemporary researchers,like many
contemporary African states,remain trapped within their own history.
They limit themselves to meeting those constraints on possible theories
that are imposed by their own particular discipline,completely ignoring
the often more rigorous constraints imposed by others.
These limitations loom largest when one of the ignored disciplines is
linguistics.We have found out more about human language in the last
thirty years than we did in the preceding three millennia.We can now
be sure that all human languages share a number of nonobvious char-
acteristics,and that these characteristics derive directly from human
biology and are therefore as indisputably formed by evolution as our
upright stance and opposable thumbs.Unfortunately,this certainty is still
obscured by mainly terminological disputes between holders of rival but
largely equivalent theories,and by arcane concepts and terminology
(“subjacency,”“empty categories,”“the theta criterion,”etc.) that remain
totally opaque to the uninitiated.Linguists must be among the world’s
worst popularizers (although Pinker 1994 constitutes an exception that154 Derek Bickerton