Mind 87of events, which meant that humanoids became humans in a revolutionary change
to the mind? The importance of this issue is very great. A slow process means that
different peoples could have been at different levels of linguistic ability, or that
languages with different forms of linguistic sophistication could have emerged
and disappeared. A revolution means that a single evolutionary development cre-
ated the mind of the original Homo sapiens, the ancestor of all modern human
beings.
Various kinds of evidence suggest an answer to this question. There is, first of
all, what seems to have been a sudden explosion of human culture – the great
spread of hunter-gatherer systems around the world, each with its own sophisti-
cated and specialized technology. Then there is the evidence of language itself.
What has been called ‘the language instinct’ turns out to be fundamental to the
activity of all human minds, even those denied the normal means to develop lan-
guage. Every child acquires or uses grammar, irrespective of the circumstances.
And given even minimal language-learning opportunities, children begin to
employ grammatical techniques with astonishing speed, soon applying linguistic
rules and making their own sentences – ones that they could never have heard
before. These findings suggest that the capacity for language developed in a short
period of time and by means of a specific evolutionary leap – the ability to acquire
and employ grammar.
Some experts have argued that the ability to learn a language is ‘hard-wired’
into the human brain.^14 By this they posit the existence of a faculty that serves as
the language-learning element in the human mind. In other words, this is the
capacity to be a human that all humans inherit; and it is this capacity each society
then relies upon to build its particular array of knowledge, skills and norms. The
immense evolutionary advantage that came with this hard-wired faculty lay in the
way humans could think, know and distribute resources in collaboration with one
another, in ever-changing ways. The social dimension of language is thus intrinsic
to both its form and its opportunities.
These pieces in the jigsaw of human prehistory can be assembled to show a
picture of human beings living in groups that use language, and therefore thought,
to deal with all their concerns. The universal qualities of mind mean that humans
are able to learn one another’s languages. One person knows more or less than
another. One person is more eloquent than the next. But all of us share the faculty
that makes eloquence possible.
Languages rely, of course, on the sounds that people make. Linguists have
identified some 140 separate pieces of sound – the total for all the world’s ways of
speaking. English uses about 40 of them; Norwegian, the most elaborate vocal
system of all Indo-European languages, uses about 60; Inuktitut uses about 50;
there are Bushman languages in southern Africa that use about 120. As one of the
world’s most eminent linguists has said, the Bushman is ‘the acrobat of the mouth’.^15
This wide range of sounds does not suggest that the sophistication of a particular
culture has any links with the outward complexity of its language or languages.
Nor are there differences in grammar that indicate any one language is more or less