A Word or Two on Language
The discovery of a small 60,000-year-old human hyoid bone, which is an essential part of the apparatus for voice communication, has--what else?--set scientific tongues wagging. The focus of this interest is not so much the 2-inch U-shaped bone that was uncovered in a cave in Israel, but the conclusion drawn from it by the Israeli, French and American archeologists who made the find. They believe the bone shows that the “basis for human speech capability appears to have been fully developed during the Middle Paleolithic” period, that is, about 100,000 to 40,000 years ago.
That was the time when Neanderthal man was making himself generally useful by discovering fire, fabricating stone tools and, either for religious or hygienic reasons, instituting the custom of burying the dead, for all of which subsequent generations have been grateful. If the conclusion of the archeologists is correct, then it might be inferred that humans have been talking--as distinct from just making noises--for a lot longer than is commonly thought.
This inference, needless to say, has provoked a degree of scholarly controversy and learned dissent. Thus Prof. Edmund S. Crelin of Yale, who describes himself as “ the expert on anatomy here,” remarks of the Israeli archeologist who wrote up the hyoid discovery in the British journal Nature that “this guy’s an idiot.” It is not clear whether that appraisal can be regarded as entirely objective, since the archeologist, Baruch Arsenburg, two years ago reviewed a book by Crelin on the evolution of the human vocal tract and pronounced its conclusions “bizarre.”
Philip Lieberman, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University, joins the debate by noting that most mammals have a hyoid bone much like that in humans, and says that “if we were to accept the reasoning of these archeologists”--that simple designation somehow seems to drip with contempt--”we could prove that pigs talk.” Dr. Jeffrey T. Laitman, associate professor of anatomy at New York’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, makes the interesting point that “this is the first and only bone of its kind that we have found” for prehistoric man, and asks whether all hyoid bones might not look the same going back to the beginning of time. And so it goes, in still another round of a long and probably unresolvable controversy. As neuroscientist John C. Marshall notes in an editorial in Nature, the argument about the language capacity of Neanderthals will “undoubtedly run and run until we discover a deep-frozen Neanderthal who is susceptible to resuscitation.”
We will not, naturally, take sides in this argument. What we would like to think is that Neanderthal man (and, of course, Neanderthal woman) was fully capable of forming all the sounds that go into human speech, instead of being limited to the rather uninteresting series of grunts, snorts, rumbles and goo-goos with which Victor Mature and his associates communicated in “One Million B.C.” It would be pleasant to think of a Neanderthal family, after a hard day’s work chipping rocks into tools and grubbing for roots and insects, sitting around their newly kindled campfire, discussing the finer things in life and maybe even harmonizing in song. In his Nobel Prize speech in 1950, William Faulkner evoked an image of the Earth one day coming to an end even as man’s inexhaustible voice was heard “still talking.” In the end, so as in the near-beginning? It would be nice to think so.
