OK, we are debating in circles. So let’s go back 400,000 years, in Europe, as you postulate, and have a look: humans! Primitive, but humanoid enough. Much closer to us than to Lucy. And they talk. So coming back to the OP’s question. How advanced, complex, abstract or whatever word you like is this language? How do we find out?
I claim it is very complex, and we find out when we hear one human emit sounds sitting around a fireplace one cold dark night and the whole group erupts in laughter although nothing else has changed around them. Somebody was able to put an image the listeners weren’t expecting in other people’s mind just by talking.
And you claim humans did not need that before ~20,000 years ago? Don’t you see the enormous social advantages that brings to every single inividual? We are a very social species after all. I see a very strong evolutionary pressure there. The better you can talk, all other things being equal, the higher your social standing, reputation, your reproductive prospects (it doesn’t get any more darwinian than that) and your chances of survival.
Yeah the identified complexity part is the weakest argument. Heck lots of information is transmitted in just 1s and 0s. I literally cannot even hear the tones in standard Chinese … to me the information does not exist.
It may be that language, as we anthrocentrically define it, is restricted to humans, perhaps an out growth of complex compound tool use and learning how pass that use on culturally, mirror neurons, etc. (one hypothesis).
To me though the lack of language in huge brained social creatures seems the leap of faith, faith in our uniqueness.
And the faith in our uniqueness has been challenged again and again before. Besides all the wrong religious conceptions about our exceptionalism that was gotten away with Darwin, hard scientists still thought a few decades ago that we are the only toolmakers.
Has anyone mentioned this?
Whale-SETI: Groundbreaking encounter with humpback whales reveals potential for nonhuman intelligence communication
Very interesting.
Especially the concept of using whales as the stand in for extraterrestrial intelligence.
So, I think there is a need to be careful about clearly identifying what is meant by “language”. Spoken language is an emergent phenomenon, and as noted in previous discussion is (probably) not unique to human beings, although we (probably) have the most sophisticated grammatical structures. Many other species (probably) have something akin to a kind of proto-linguistics in which which there is some continuity of structure between interacting groups but lack the ability to convey complex concepts through auditory patterns alone. Certain cetaceans (and although not discussed, likely psittacines, corvids, elephantidae, and perhaps others) may have a more complex ability to actually form grammars and vocabularies that are not as expansive as human languages but may reflect some ability to discuss future or hypothetical events.
The notion that “Nature is parsimonious” is a kind of assumption that is based in the fact that evolution does not anticipate future needs or provide explicit functionality searching for an application; however, there are often phenotypical and behavioral structures that are evolved for one purpose and adapted to others. Formal grammar is not something for which there would ever be an expectation of a linear evolution because there are just too many steps, but it could be formed from a series of other developments into a coherent system for communication, and the utility of that for a species that has to adapt and form complex and shifting social groups is evident.
There is no expectation by paleolinguistics that all languages emerged essentially simultaneously, and no general agreement on when and how different language families developed, but it is widely believed that language evolved repeatedly and in overlapping and interacting ways to get the recognized modern and extinct language families. The only true population isolates would be in the Americas, and even there it is now clear that there were multiple successive waves of migration which likely brought with them at least the rudiments of novel vocabularies and grammars. The languages of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Oceana, are all due to repeated intermixing, and while there are distinct language families they all have identifiable grammatical structures that likely stem from some common proto-language basis. There are a handful of true language isolates, like the Basque language, but those are rare and still capable of being translated with some functional degree of accuracy.
One of the curious things about human languages is that there are so very many of them; it would seem that at least regionally it would make sense to have a very common basis with modest variations, but in fact most languages and even many regional dialects are barely if at all mutually intelligible, and ‘trade languages’ and pidgins are used for commerce. This suggests two things; one is that language (the grammatical structure and specific vocabulary) is a highly emergent social behavior evolved to bind members to a group with common ideas rather than to facilitate broader communication among groups; and the other is that our faculty with languages is highly adaptable, i.e. we can learn new languages and along with them new social mores and cues. This is very necessary with tool-making primates who are in as constant conflict with each other as they are with the many natural hazards; and perhaps not so much with, say, humpback whales.
Whales and other cetaceans have a very different experience of the world than we do, so even if they have a faculty for language (I personally think that they do), the ideas they express may be very different, as are their interests, beliefs about the nature of the world, et cetera. The same is true for aves, elephants, and perhaps other intellectual creatures, particularly octopus and squid whose very neural basis is so fundamentally different from vertebrates it is difficult to even imagine their perception. And yet, they are all probably more similar to us in that way than any alien species would be; aliens with a different biochemistry and evolutionary path might have completely different senses, a different temporal scale of perception, totally different social and reproductive structures, et cetera.
Stranger
I’m looking for abstractions in language. Multiple participants have maintain a common meaning of something that is a ‘word’. It doesn’t have to correspond at all to human senses of a ‘word’, or use anything that we consider grammar now, but that’s what language is, the use of something that consistently represents a commonly understood meaning. What animals do with language might not be anything we recognize easily because we aren’t whales.
What might be interesting are interactions between different cetacean species that appear to communicate in different ways. This might reveal something more about the complexity of their communication. But I don’t expect to find a bright line between non-language communication and language in evolution.
One thing about human language is that it’s not instinctive. The capacity for it is, but humans from different societies have completely different languages, because that’s what they learned, and an infant adopted from one society to another will grow up speaking its adoptive language, not the language of its ancestors.
Unfortunately, whales make it very hard to test this, because whales get around a lot. Any given individual of a whale species can travel to anywhere in the world where that species lives, so there might be only one society per species. There might be some cases of whales who were adopted by humans in infancy and raised in captivity, and if so, we could compare their vocalizations to those of wild whales and maybe gain some clues, but if it hasn’t already happened, that would be an ethically questionable experiment.
Never heard of hump whales begging the orcas not to kill and eat the tongue of their calf, nor of the orcas responding “tough luck!” to that plea.
Never heard of whales laughing either. No idea how we could identify whales’ laughter at all.
I think they might make some sounds in the confrontations and the reactions might be revealing. Or not. Don’t know how often these events have been recorded.
We’re in luck! The mystery of whale song unraveled by scientists, study says.
Well, not the mystery we were talking about. The mystery was how whales were able to sing underwater. Turns out baleen whales have adapted larynxes to produce their songs and toothed whales developed an organ in their noses.
Project CETI has so far raised $33 million to use artificial intelligence to decode sperm whale language. Ross Andersen of the Atlantic explores how a first contact with humans might come about and what marine scientists think we should discuss. Some scientists say, “Nothing - leave them alone,” while others are more ambitious. Gifted article, good for 14 days.
Whatever whales have to say to us it’s probably an expletive filled, and well justified tirade. If whales had a middle finger we would have seen it used frequently.
If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say?
I’d say, “I’ll feed you a mess of squid if you scour the ocean floor and bring me anything made of silver or gold.”
Shouldn’t we rather say: “Sorry, A-Whale-Ito, we did not know any better, and many of us still don’t. Don’t take it personally.”
Yes, we should not only apologise fo the hunting, but for the mining and the polution too, including noise polution. But I very much doubt their language is able to express, much less cope with, the levels of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that are completely unremarcable to us humans.
I’d take it a step further and apologize to the whales for inadvertently triggering the Holocene extinction event. You know, the one that should probably be renamed the “Anthrocene” event, because let’s face it, it’s entirely our fault. Humans: the species that managed to turn “Oops, my bad” into a global catastrophe.
I’d say, “you see, we humans have this knack for messing things up. We’ve overfished your oceans, polluted your waters, and disrupted your migratory routes. And now, we’ve set in motion an extinction event that might wipe out 90% of all species—including you.”
Whale: “Tell me something I don’t know.”
There is megafauna in Europe, Asia, and America to this day.
But it is true that megafaunal assemblages greatly decreased in diversity, with the vast majority of species voing extinct.
Yes, exactly. Human societies across the globe greatly increased in size and sophostication within a couple tens of thousands of years of each other at most. These changes encompassed groups of humans that had split geographically many tens of thousands of years earlier.
There’s no way for a biological change to have occurred and propagated to all those far flung groups, so the only explanation for this increase in social complexity is a cultural shift that all Homo sapiens were biologically primed for already, and the global rise of conditions that allowed these complex societies to actually arise (so probably climate related).
I’d guess that there was occasional travel among those groups; after all, if people can get from place A to place B once, they can probably do it again. And it wouldn’t have taken nearly as much interconnection to make a cultural change prevalent as a biological one; so I don’t think it needs to have been a spontaneous response to climate change in all places. Even ‘Hey, the folks in the next valley are doing this neat thing’ multiplied over ten thousand years can get you a really long distance; throw in an occasional rare instance of ‘this kid who showed up half dead hanging onto that floating tree is doing some weird stuff, come see’ and you could get a lot of places that can’t be walked to.
This is true, but seems irrelevant to the question of when language originally evolved, because surely all those sapiens migrating in waves had full fledged languages, even in the earliest waves?