Special Episode: Professor Steven Mithen & The Language Puzzle

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You're listening to the latest episode in the TPWKY Book Club series, where I chat with authors of popular science and medicine books about their latest work.

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Have you ever put your foot in your mouth or held your tongue?

Or maybe you didn't and let the cat out of the bag?

Do you have a friend that's a total chatterbox or met someone who has a way with words?

Taken by themselves, these idioms don't really make literal sense.

I'm not really asking who is bendy enough that they have actually inserted their foot into their mouth.

I mean, who has said something embarrassing that they shouldn't have.

We use idioms like these to communicate a feeling, a shorthand for what might require a longer description, or just to add a little fun.

And the utility of idioms gives us a glimpse into the incredible power of human language.

Our capacity for language sets us apart from all other species.

It has shaped the evolution of our species, our societies, our cultures, our history, and it will continue to do so, while also being shaped by us.

How we ever evolved this ability is so mind-boggling that, ironically, I find myself at a loss for words.

Fortunately, my guest for this episode has not only the words to describe language evolution, but also the research to back them up.

In today's episode, I'm joined by Stephen Mythen, professor of archaeology at the University of Reading and author to discuss his latest book, The Language Puzzle, piecing together the six-million year story of how words evolved.

In this tremendous undertaking, Professor Mythen takes readers on a tour spanning hundreds of thousands of years and across many diverse fields of study, from linguistics to archaeology, genetics to neuroscience, and beyond.

What results is a comprehensive picture of how we came to have language?

How do babies babble one day and then the next outpours a flood of words?

What can primate communication today tell us about the early stages of human language?

Where do tool making, brain size, and bipedalism fit into the language puzzle?

Stay tuned.

We'll take a quick break and get into all those questions and more.

Professor Mithan, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

I really enjoyed your book, The Language Puzzle, for so many reasons, but I especially loved how you integrated many distinct fields of study, ones that you might not normally encounter in the same place.

Why is this interdisciplinary approach or perspective so crucial when it comes to exploring something like the origins of language?

We really don't have any choice because language is such a such an incredible phenomenon.

I mean, it uses not only our vocal tracks to make the sounds or you can use your hands to make sign language but that relies on our physiology and ultimately our brains.

So we need to draw not only on human anatomy, but also on neuroscience and psychology.

But that's just a small part of it because sitting behind all those is the genetics of language.

And then we have to actually think about how humans evolved.

So that takes us into the archaeological record of human ancestors, the fossil record, and the archaeological evidence for how they behave.

And then we've also got to look at other animals because we're closely related to the chimpanzees.

We've got to think about how they communicate.

And of course, the other big areas of disciplines is language itself, linguistics, which is a hugely complicated and diverse subject.

And around the margins of that, we move into subjects such as music and philosophy and so forth.

So to really address the evolution of language, you've got to find the the evidence and the right theories and the right interpretations in all these different disciplines and then try to join them together and that's why i call the book the language puzzle because it's like finding bits of a jigstaw puzzle gradually piecing them together until a picture emerges of how this remarkable ability that we have to communicate var language could have possibly evolved Yes, and I am really excited to dig into some of these individual pieces of the language puzzle.

But before we do that, maybe we should take a step back and just define what language is and how is language different from communication yeah i mean that that's easily said but but it's quite challenging and many people will define language differently because of course we do talk about how chimpanzees and whales and birds have language but that's a very different type of communication system to what we should think of as language i suppose the key elements of spoken language or signed language are very discrete units called words and words have shared meanings and often those meanings are entirely arbitrary so you know I can say a word like a tree or a dog and unless you have some shared understanding you you won't know what I'm naturally talking about because it's arbitrary and then we can combine those words in different orders to generate a particular meaning.

And you can also interpret that meaning that I say.

So if I say the man bit the dog, it means something entirely different from the dog bit the man.

It's the same words, but the order is playing a role as well.

So really, languages have got units of

communication, words, and rules for how we combine them together to convey larger meanings.

And of course, there's so many different types of language which have all their different types of words and different types of rules.

It's an incredibly diverse.

You know, there's over 7,000 languages in the world today, which is probably a tiny fraction of those that ever existed.

So it's a remarkable, it's a remarkable phenomenon.

But it's those two key aspects that I think distinguish it between the communication systems of all other animals and some other communication systems that we'd use, like music or art and so forth, which are also ways of communicating, of course.

That in itself is a fascinating aspect of this, just the other ways that we communicate beyond language.

And it got me wondering, you know, using this definition of language with the components as you just laid out, could you see any prerequisites for a species or a lineage that would be necessary for language to evolve within that group?

Yes, you can do, because I think you have to, I mean, obviously, you need a sufficiently large brain to be able to contain a sufficient number of different words to make a viable language.

You also need to have a vocal tract which can make a sufficient number of different sounds, which can be joined together as syllables to make words but they also need to be made in a consistent manner so that if i want to say a word i'm going to pronounce it broadly the same each time otherwise you wouldn't know what i'm talking about so if we look at say chimpanzees one of their constraints in vocalizations is that they they have a limited ability to have that consistency because of the nature of the vocal tracts.

And they also have a limited ability to make a sufficiently wide range of sounds.

Again, because of the way their jaws are particularly elongated, which makes a very different shape of vocal tract to which we have.

So you need some basic anatomy in place to be able to make the sounds, and you need a sufficient size of brain to be able to remember those sounds and remember the meaning of words.

Now, those thresholds were probably passed pretty early in human evolution.

So I don't think they are,

you know, anything restricted to our species.

I think they must have been shared with many of our ancestors.

Let's take a quick break.

And when we get back, there's still so much to discuss.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

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Welcome back, everyone.

I've been chatting with Professor Stephen Mythen about his book, The Language Puzzle, piecing together the six million year story of how words evolved.

Let's get back into things.

The natural outcropping of this is the language as we use in human language, as you said, involves this vocal component or sign language.

The bottom line is, would we be able to recognize language in another species if it looked far different from ours?

Yeah, I guess so.

But Erin, just remember, I am watching you on a video.

video, and you're gesturing the whole time as you speak.

So, you know, when we talk about spoken language,

it's a fully integrated system with facial expressions, with body posture, and very often with gesturing with hands.

And some people say it's that sort of physical movements that convey so much of the meaning of what we want to say.

And of course, it's also, it's not just the words, it's our intonation.

It's the prosody of language, that musicality of language that can put a particular meaning on a particular type of phrase, whether you're angry or happy or pleased and so forth.

Obviously, we can do some very clever studies on the communications whether by chimpanzees or by whales or birds.

And we can see that they have some elements which are certainly important to language today.

So, whether you're a chimpanzee or a young bird or a young whale, you do learn the communication system of your community.

It's not just genetically present.

There's some learning.

So you'll grow up learning a particular way of communicating.

And there certainly are some aspects, certainly in chimpanzee communication, that are word-like and language-like.

So they are able to control...

the loudness which they speak or the duration of a phrase.

They'll take account of who else is around when they when they make a vocalization because they know they want to inform some people but not others.

Now, all of these are crucial elements of our spoken language as well, but in themselves they don't constitute language by themselves.

I'm sure we can see the same, make the same comparisons with birds and with whales, but of course they're much more evolutionary distant and their communication systems are one more of if they have language like elements it's more one of convergent evolution whereas with chimpanzees, we shared an ancestor just about 8 million years ago.

So that ancestor probably gave rise to both the chimpanzee-type communication today and our language today.

To think about the convergent evolution possibilities of what else language would look like, I think is a really intriguing part.

But I think maybe we'll stay in the realm of humans or hominins.

And I'd like to now turn to the past, to our hominin ancestors.

What can we infer about the origins of language from their fossil remains?

It's a huge challenge.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that or our listeners that.

And, you know, it's a slightly odd subject for an archaeologist to

tackle because the past is absolutely silent.

You know, I can't hear people talk in the past and so forth.

But we have no choice because if we're going to understand language, we've got to look at evolutionary history.

We can look at the skeletal remains or the fossilized remains, and we are able able in some instances

to reconstruct or shape all these parts of the of the vocal tract because sometimes we get very small bones remaining or particular parts of the cranium that indicates how the face and the the larynx and so forth would have would have been positioned and we can see that even by 500,000 years ago and probably earlier from those little scraps of bone the vocal tract was probably much the same as ours today and we can also find tiny earbones from our human ancestors going back again hundreds of thousands of years and we can look at the shape of the earbones that influence our hearing our audio tract and we can also see when they are most similar to ours so we can use these bits of fossilized remains to reconstruct as far as we can the both the vocal tract and an audio tract and by 500 000 years years ago they're looking sufficiently similar to ours so that we can say the physical capability of language was there whether the mental capability was there or not is another question now for that of course we can look at brain size

but it's not clear that there is a particular threshold of brain size that we would need for language you know how many neurons would you need to be able to have language

We don't know.

And of course, very young children with much smaller brains than adults, they have fabulous language skills.

So it's not clear to me it's the absolute size of the brain is important.

It's probably the way all the neurons are networked inside, connected inside.

But of course, that's something that we cannot see as archaeologists.

But to get some insights of that, we can look at aspects of tool making, hunting, social behavior, whether we're building fires or making huts, because all of those are complex behavior that must have drawn either directly or language skills or equivalent cognitive processes.

I appreciate that layout of like, okay, these are the possibilities, but whether or not language itself would have emerged is a different question.

And you mentioned a few different things that would have driven or would have been an obvious need for language.

And of course, today, you know, we use language for literally everything.

It's impossible to imagine things that we don't use it for.

But would there have been particular drivers of or like important reasons that communication would have been elaborated in this way to lead to language for these early hominins?

A common argument among many anthropologists and one that I tend to support is that one of the earliest functions of language would have been for building social bonds between individuals.

And of course, that remains one of the primary uses of language, as in chit-chat, gossip, and so forth.

Now, why that became important was that if we go back to about four million years ago, our hominin ancestors, which were probably not much more than one and a half meters high and rather defenseless creatures by themselves, they were increasingly living in rather open savannah environments as the landscape changed.

Environments which are quite difficult and dangerous to live in because there's lots of dangerous predators around.

So they're probably needing to live in larger group sizes.

They're probably needing to cooperate more than others.

They couldn't just escape up a tree, for instance, because there were not many trees around.

So they need to work together both for finding food and defending against predators.

That might have been one of this stimulants for language, not to be communicating information, but to be building social bonds.

But we've got to think those earlier stages of language, they probably didn't involve many words, let alone complex grammar.

There was probably you know, not that different from chimpanzee type grunts and barks, but becoming more directed to particular individuals, becoming richer, more emotionally involved and so forth.

So socializing is certainly important, but also just transmitting information about what's happening in the landscape, the site of a predator, the location of some ripe berries or some tubers or a carcass could be exploited.

I mean, I'm sure passing on that factual information was also been of selective value and helped push language that bit forward.

So trying to find one particular reason I don't think is right.

And I think if we look at language today, we can see how it's used for all sorts of purposes.

I'm sure that was also the case right back in our early times.

We've touched a few times on chimpanzees today, and our other ape relatives today can tell us about the origins of human language.

And you have a really fascinating chapter about this where you examine some of these research that has revealed the capacity or what their capacity might be for language on both anatomical and cognitive levels.

And I was hoping you could just take me through a little bit of that research.

Ethologists, I mean, they do just such fascinating experiments.

If we go back 30 years, we'd think that chimpanzees just bark and grunt and these are all just really emotional outbursts.

But what ethologists have done is that they've worked with wild chimpanzees.

because once you have them in zoos or in institutions,

you can't really see their natural behavior communications.

They work in the the world, but they make subtle manipulations of those wild settings.

So, for instance, if they see a trail that chimpanzees will frequently use when out

gathering food and so forth, they might put an artificial snake on the track.

And they might ensure that one chimpanzee sees that.

And then they'll be able to record its responses.

its vocal responses.

Who does it call to?

When does it call?

Does it call to everybody or quite quite what and they they do the similar things with putting different types of food out and so forth so gradually trying to control certain factors and stimulate certain calls and gradually then piece together what those calls not so much what they might mean but the function that they're playing another really fascinating experiment is orangutans and orangutans live with their

the mothers live with their infants for for many years and their big predator are tigers in the forest.

So they've actually put people out in tiger costumes crawling through the forest.

Orangutans see them and they listen to the response.

And one of the amazing things is that orangutans sometimes don't respond immediately.

They wait until the predator has passed and then they call.

The idea of that is they're able to be aware of the situation but control themselves because if you call immediately you're just going to attract the attention of the predator but But you need to call in a while to warn your offspring and the other female orangutan that there is danger about.

So these experiments show how these barks and grunts and calls aren't just emotional outbursts.

They're carefully controlled relating to the social and the ecological context.

That experiment reveals what seems like a deliberate delay in communication, but how much can we really say about conscious intent there?

We don't know whether the orangutans are actually consciously aware of what they're doing.

We don't know that.

I mean, we know that we would be consciously aware.

We don't really know whether that is the case in orangutans or whether it's just something that's been selected.

I suspect they are.

You know, I suspect there's a lot more consciousness, not only in these great apes, but many other animals than we're generally prepared to credit them with.

Let's take a quick break here.

We'll be back before you know it.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my loved life?

I think we will see a Twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

Betrayal Weekly is back for season two with brand new stories.

The detective comes driving up fast and just like screeches right in the parking lot.

I swear I'm not crazy, but I think he poisoned me.

I feel trapped.

My breathing changes.

More money, more money, more money.

And I went white.

I realize, wow, like he is not a mentor.

He's pretty much a monster.

New stories, new voices, and shocking manipulations.

This didn't just happen to me.

It happened to hundreds of other people.

But these aren't just stories of destruction.

They're stories of survival, of people picking up the pieces and daring to tell the truth.

I'm going to tell my story, and I'm going to hold my head up.

Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome back, everyone.

I'm here chatting with Professor Stephen Mithen about his book, The Language Puzzle.

Let's get into some more questions.

So along those lines, you discuss a concept in your book called displacement.

So the ability to communicate about things that are not actually present.

We thought that this was something unique to humans, but turns out that it might not be.

That's part of displacement.

The other big area of displacement is being able to talk not just about the present, but about the future and the past.

so i can talk about what happened to me yesterday or i can talk about what happened to my family 50 years ago or i can talk about the archaeological distance past equally i can talk about what i expect to happen in the future and that that predicting the future is a really important element you can think of how that would have been of enormous adaptive value to our hominin ancestors in terms of planning by imagining a different future but not only imagining in your mind but be able to tell other people of what you imagine and somebody else might say, well, I don't think it'll be like this.

I think if we do there,

we'll have more success hunting or gathering and so forth.

So the displacement of time is really facilitated by language, be able to communicate that.

Now, when did that occur?

When did that happen is difficult to say.

But be able to talk about the future and things that you cannot actually see.

at that time.

Now, we know we can do that even with quite young children, talk about something that's not in their visual field.

It's unlikely chimpanzees can manage, communicate things not in their current visual field.

But that's clearly a pervasive element of language, something really important in its evolution.

Going a little bit more into these experiments studying present-day, you know, our present-day ape relatives, what can that tell us about the origins of language being more gestural or more vocal?

Or, you know, what are some of the arguments for these?

We do have to be slightly careful because we've got to remember that chimpanzees, they aren't our ancestor.

They're a modern species.

So this chimpanzee-like communication has had the same length of evolutionary time as

our modern language.

But the difference between vocal and gestural communication is important.

We can see that maybe with chimpanzees and gorillas, gestural is a really important form of communication as it remains with us today.

And some anthropologists have argued that actually language evolved originally by gesture, by sound language, and then quite late in evolution it sort of switched over into a vocal form.

You know, our vocal tracks really evolved for breathing and for eating, and they've been secondarily used for language.

So they argued that gesture language lies at the origin.

Now, I don't believe that.

The simple reason is I think our vocal tracts are so superbly adapted now to making such a wide range of vocalizations.

You know, when we talk, we use such subtle manipulations of different muscles to be able to change the shape of our mouth, our larynx to be able to create the different sounds.

I don't think that's a late development.

I think it's had millions of years of evolution and it must have been for vocal communication.

So I think gesture has always been supporting it, but never driving the evolution of language.

I'm wondering where hearing fits into this as well, human hearing.

How has that evolved in conjunction with our vocal tract or our language capacity?

The evolution of hearing, I think, must have been relatively more advanced than speaking in the early periods of our evolution, because as hunter-gatherers that have been very attuned to listening to the sounds of nature, listening to the sounds of approaching predators or birds singing or leaves, the wind and so forth.

So listening carefully to nature is critical, not just for human hunter-gatherers, but for various apes and so forth.

So there was always, I think, a very strong capacity there.

We can see how that evolved by looking at some of the shapes of the earbones, as I mentioned earlier, because we can use those to reconstruct the inner ear and what frequencies they were susceptible to.

At some time in human evolution, probably around 500,000 years ago, a bit later, we can see how these change to become more sensible to rather lower range of frequencies, which tend to be more that we have in spoken language rather than in nature itself.

So we can make some estimates of how hearing might have evolved.

But it's as crucial to language.

Of course, just remember, when I speak to you, if we're in the same room, my words are just little puffs of air.

They come into your ears and your eardrums and convert them into electrical signals, which then your brain decodes into concepts that are in your brain.

And if it's right, those concepts would be the same ones that I tried to communicate with you.

Where do words exist?

We're not really sure words exist, but the ear and the audio track is an absolute critical aspect of language.

And you're right to raise it, because it does often get neglected in people talking about the evolution of language.

The evolution of hearing is as important as the evolution of speaking.

And it kind of brings me to the next question, which is, as we discussed, you know, the vocal origins of language would have just started out not with recognizable words, of course, with like discrete meanings necessarily.

What would those early vocalizations have looked like or sounded like when they began to take on meaning?

And then how was that meaning communicated?

I guess iconic words is kind of where I'm going with this.

We didn't really enter into the realms of speculation here, of course.

But this question of what were the first words and how did words start has been one of the biggest challenges in people thinking about and writing about language evolution.

Well, ever since Plato, because Plato in the fifth century BC, he, you know, in his dialogue Cratylus, he was speculating about the origins of words.

And in the Enlightenment period, scholars such as Herder, they really struggled to think what is the bridge between human words and animals barks and cries they can't really find anything in the middle there now we do have something in the middle which is what we call today iconic words these are words that don't have arbitrary meanings or not entirely arbitrary meanings but they either sound like or create a sense impression of what they refer to.

So the obvious ones are onomatopoeias like bang and quack and so forth.

And, you know, when I say these words, you don't have to know a meaning of them.

You have an intuitive understanding of what they're referring to.

So an idea came around that maybe these iconic words were the earliest type of words, and then others built on top of that.

Research over the last decade or two has really confirmed that, because what it's shown is that young children, when they're learning language, the majority of the first words they learn are indeed iconic words.

And as we talk to children, we tend to litter our language with iconic words rather than the arbitrary words.

So, you know, would say rather than saying, look at this dog, we say, look at that woof or something like that.

We litter iconic words into our conversations with children because it facilitates their language learning.

And we actually use iconic words.

a huge amount of language without realizing it.

In English and many languages, when we talk about small, little things, often quick moving, we often use short words and high and front vowels like B or Flea or P.

As I say those, I'm making little small size with my mouth and it's sort of mimicking the size of the object.

Whereas you think about large, slow, heavy objects, we use words like enormous or rhinoceros or hippopotamus.

Now I'm using these back vowels, O's and Us, and by the size of my mouth, I'm generating a sense impression of what that image was like.

So if we go back to babies, if we're in a room and I point and say, look at that balloon, now they'll intuitively grasp balloon because the word balloon creates that sense, that frame, that size in the mouth.

And it connects what they're seeing with the sound that's being made.

So these are iconic words and my guess is that iconic words did indeed provide a bridge between these sort of animal grunts and barks.

Don't want to dismiss their complication, but nevertheless they don't have meaning, to

words in modern language, the majority of which have arbitrary meanings.

And in the middle there, I think, sits arbitrary words.

And, you know, by the time they get to about 13 or 14, arbitrary words take over.

And that's because we just can't have enough iconic words to talk about all the different things we want to.

But by that time, they've understood, ah, words are labels for things and they're shared understandings.

So

that's how I think they emerge.

Iconic words as a bridge is really crucial.

And you mentioned in your book about the role that synesthesia may have played in these iconic words sort of existing or coming to have meaning.

And I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the role that synesthesia may have played.

You know, synesthesia is this condition whereby our different senses are somehow connected.

In some adults it's found in quite an extreme form where they'll always associate a particular word with a particular colour or a particular

texture or so forth.

It's a cross-modal connection between their different sensory organs.

That's really extreme form, but we all, and especially young children, probably have synesthesia in

some sort of mild form.

And it was indeed suggested by some psychologists a number of years ago that this may have facilitated the development of iconic words early in our ancestors.

It may well be that as the brain was enlarging in our early ancestors, such as Homer habilis, living about two and a half million years ago, that the level of synesthesia was to some extent a bit larger than we have in our modern minds today.

And that facilitate this connection between sounds and

what can be seen, or what can be felt, or what can be tasted.

If that is the case, it would have been a big boost to sort of iconic words.

And I think there's a very strong argument for that.

Of course, it's really difficult to prove.

And we do need some more research about that low-level synesthesia that I think isn't present in all of us today.

So you mentioned iconic words as being this bridge between vocalizations and these vocalizations taking on meaning.

And we also discussed how babies learn iconic words first.

How much does or doesn't the phrase ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny apply in this case?

Like, how much can we deduce about language origins from babies learning language?

Yeah, well, I mean, that's a huge question.

And I'm not sure on the answer myself.

We've got to be very cautious of this because, of course, babies are growing up in a language environment, not only a language environment, but ones where people particularly their mothers and their fathers and their siblings are talking to them in a way that is facilitating the acquisition of language.

When we talk to babies, we use what's sometimes called motheres or infant-directed speech.

We exaggerate the contours of language, the length of vowels, and so forth.

And that helps children grasp words where they start and where they stop and what they might mean.

Of course, early humans are evolving in a language absent environment.

They're building it themselves.

So they're very different contexts.

But nevertheless, both in evolution and in development, we're dealing somehow with the acquisition of language.

So I think we can see some parallels, but I'd be really cautious about saying there's a direct recapitulation of phylogeny happening here.

I don't think there is.

I think both our hominin ancestors and infosity are just solving a problem of how do we communicate vocally.

And to some extent, similar solutions are found.

The speed at which babies acquire language is just phenomenal.

You know, the fact that you can take a baby and put it in any language community and it will acquire the language so that people are speaking to it.

However different that is, it's just astonishing.

And there's been some remarkable research in psychology whereby we now understand how babies are beginning to identify words and grasp the meaning of them.

It's a fascinating area of linguistics, supportive of evolutionary ideas, but perhaps not giving a solution to how language evolved.

I mean, it's incredible just to go from like this baby who then learns a few words and then suddenly is just talking nonstop is amazing to watch and experience.

And we could talk about the language learning in babies for the rest of this time, I'm sure.

But I want to fast forward us now to the point where humans have language or languages

and ask what drives the evolution of a language once it's in existence like what how do words change or how are they invented i mentioned earlier that there's over 7 000 different languages in the world today and they've all got different vocabularies and different grammars but they share similarities by having these

having both iconic and arbitrary words by having grammatical structures.

Our early human ancestors, living between the time of the commonass of the chimpanzees and modern humans, we evolved around 150,000 years ago, may have had language, but not fully modern language.

So I'd argue that one grade of our ancestors, Homo habilis, probably used iconic sounds within their ape-like vocalizations.

By the time we got to Homo erectus, they were probably using the first iconic words, but probably didn't have lots of arbitrary words at that time.

By the time we moved on to Homo heidelbergensis and then the Neanderthals, they've probably got words which are iconic and which are arbitrary.

They've probably got some grammatical structures.

But when you get onto modern humans, there's probably additional components of language being added there.

So I think they're all languages, but languages of a different type to modern human language.

And those languages were changing partly by biological evolution, by further evolutions of the vocal tract, of brain connections, of the oral tract, but also by cultural transmission, which is the way our languages change today.

Languages are constantly evolving.

Words change their meanings.

They change how they're pronounced.

We invent new words.

And this is done partly without any intention and partly done sometimes intentionally because our circumstances change and we need new different types of words.

So language is something that's constantly, constantly evolving and changing.

By conversations like we're having today, you might hear me pronounce a word in a particular way or use a word you haven't heard before or use a word with a meaning that you like but hadn't particularly been aware of.

Then you might go away and use that to somebody else and so forth.

And gradually, those which work well get adopted by a language community.

Those which are no longer significant just get lost.

So language is continually, continually changing.

Is the rate at which a language changes affected by things like war or conflict or upheaval in some way?

Times of, I suppose, catastrophe can change language because you can have large numbers of particular speakers wiped out, leaving the population of maybe predominantly younger people or one gender rather than another or one class rather than another.

And of course, they would have a vocabulary, maybe maybe even dialects, which are different to the larger previous population.

Times of warfare can do the same.

Times of political change can also have a big impact on language when political leaders want to impose one language over those of many minority languages.

So there's all events like plagues, warfare, political interactions that can push languages of community in one direction with another and they sit on top of this low-level constant gradual evolution of language change and of course you know invention of technology has a huge impact if we think about what changes have happened in our lifetimes they're probably going to be in the range of digital communication i mean aaron if i talk to you about the cloud now you know i'm not talking about clouds in the sky i'm talking about some sort of strange digital storage mechanism.

I might have talked to you, what, five years ago, 10 years ago about a mouse and not an animal, but do you still use a mouse?

Maybe you still do.

I still do on your computer, okay.

Or I say, have you got your tablet?

I don't mean your tablet, your medicine.

I mean your tablet, which is the other thing.

So this is a lovely example of how technical change has changed the meaning of words.

And what we've done, we've just borrowed existing words that seem suitable, that people understand.

And so quickly they've become part of everyday vocabulary and they still sit with those other meanings but we just draw on the context in which they're said to know what meaning is meaning is being used just to kind of take a step back and and consider I guess all of these pieces together and borrowing from Stephen Jay Gould's you know thought experiment of replaying the tape of life if we rewind evolutionary time at what point in human evolution does language become inevitable

I think that the point in time when language became inevitable was probably about two million years ago when we began walking on two legs.

The evolution of bipedalism rather than going around on all floors most of the time.

Because that changed our whole anatomy.

It gave us, it freed our hands, it changed the way we breathe.

it changed the shape of the vocal tract.

It ultimately allowed the brain to grow in size.

And I think once that's been released, a myriad of selection pressures led to the evolution of language.

If you could run human evolution again, you might not have the same selective pressures, you might have different ones.

Language might not take the same format as

today, but I think you'd have ended up with a complex form of vocal communication.

And the reason for that is it's just so bloody useful, isn't it?

I mean, you know,

and you can see its value because after about 100,000 years ago, humanity was just transformed and culture transformed.

Because I think that's when the final stage of the modern language evolved.

And the key to that, I think, is our ability to use metaphor.

Metaphor connects ideas together in the mind and it allows us to think creatively, to hold abstract concepts.

And I think it's no, it should not be surprising that.

After that had evolved at about 100,000 years ago, as soon as the ice age came to an end, people invented agriculture and farming.

And from farming, we went to towns and cities and civilizations and empires and within just 10,000 years to the present day.

And I think the ultimate cause of that is the evolution of fully modern language.

I think it lies behind everything in the modern world.

Well, now that we've looked back at the origins of language, I would love to turn and look to the future.

Knowing what we know about the origins of language, about how it has evolved over written history, what can we hypothesize about the future and what, for instance, English might look like 100 years from now?

And at what point does it become unrecognizable to us humans in 2025 today?

Well, that's another really impossible question to answer, isn't it?

As you jolly well know.

What I think we can say is it's going to be continually evolving.

I think English will get simpler, if you like.

I think it will lose various of its grammatical constructions today.

We can see it happening.

People don't use apostrophes properly anymore, do they, when they write and uh etcetera, okay.

Why is it becoming simpler?

Because it's becoming a global language.

Because it got more and more second learners to it.

More people need to learn it as their as a first language or second language or third language.

So it's it's developing even more learnability than it has at the moment.

So I think lang the grammatical structures of English are going to become even simpler as

we move forward.

Of course, we did see a transformation of language already in the past when writing was invented 5,000 years ago, and we're seeing another transformation of it now with the way we write in social media.

That's changing not only written text, but I think it's also influencing the spoken language as well.

And in the past, the people who have tended to make the most most innovations in language seems to be adolescent women.

They've often been the main innovators in language change, as far as we can see.

And I suspect that's going to continually happen in the world.

Quite where it's going to go, we don't know.

I think what we will know is that language will continue to be the most wonderful, fabulous thing we have.

but also the most dangerous because we talk about using language, we use it to make friends, to tell stories and so forth.

But we also know the danger of language, especially in the world we're living in at the moment with peace negotiations starting or stopping in Gaza or in Russia.

Those particular words that are said and the ambiguity of words and so forth, which sometimes are so valuable, sometimes are so dangerous.

So I think we know that our future lives will depend on how language is used.

and how it will develop.

Profound.

And I completely agree.

And I just just want to thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

This was an absolutely eye-opening conversation, so enlightening.

So, thank you.

Well, I'm really delighted to have the interview to join your podcast.

I hope this one doesn't kill you or anybody else.

It's been great fun talking to you, Erin.

A huge thank you again to Professor Stephen Mythen for taking the time to chat with me.

I can already tell that our conversation and this book will stick with me for quite a while.

If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website, thispodcastwillkillYou.com, where I'll post a link to where you can find the language puzzle, piecing together the six million year story of how words evolved, as well as a link to Stephen's website, where you you can find his other fascinating work.

And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including, but not limited, to transcripts, quarantining and placebo-rita recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a first-hand account form, and music by Bloodmobile.

Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.

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Well, until next time, keep washing those hands.

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