LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp