An anthropologist is now proposing that language arose as a way to pacify and reassure babies during our evolutionary past. Human infants are particularly underdveloped and mothers would need to put them down to get about their daily activities, and talking was a way to keep them calm. The implication here is that since language was a response to coping with bipedal locomotion & big brains, it might be a far more ancient feature of humanity (broadly defined as hominids) than the “Great Leap” of the past 100,000 years (bipedal locomotion is millions of years old, while the human brain has increased in size gradually rather than in one leap). I don’t find the argument persuasive in that I can’t see why syntax and complex lexicons needed to arise to reassure babies. Anyway, if mother-infant interaction is so important, it seems kind of weird that ‘papa’ might be the most ancient of words.
Addendum: I should add that there are very different paradigms that explain the utility of language. For example, most people tend to accept the thesis that language exists to facilitate the communication of information of practical import (eg; “The mammoth is there!”). But, a fast rising rival is the “gossip” theory, that is, language is a grooming substitute, so its relevance is less direct environmental fitness than social fitness. Geoffrey Miller takes this to its logical extreme and basically suggests that language is a tool men use to impress and seduce women, improving their reproductive/sexual fitness (in addition to sexual selective takes on the gossip theory, that is, that gossip serves to communicate social status, ergo, genetic fitness).
Posted by razib at 12:02 PM