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From the outset, ‘spirit’ is cursed with the ‘burden’ of matter, which appears in this case in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and thus as it really exists for myself as well. Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men.

(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1845-6/1963: 85-6)

7.1 Chomsky’s Model

Replying to his many critics, Chomsky (1979: 57) once accused them of not understanding science. To do science, Chomsky explained, ‘you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent…’ The linguist — according to Chomsky — cannot study humans articulating their thoughts under concrete social conditions. Instead, you must replace reality with an abstract model. To deny this is to reject science altogether.

‘Linguistic theory’, in Chomsky’s (1965: 3) well-known formulation, ‘is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance: In this deliberately simplified model, children acquire language in an instant (Chomsky 1976: 15). The evolution of language is also instantaneous (1998: 17, cited in Botha 1999: 245). Semantic representations are not socially constructed but innate and pre-existent (1988: 191; 1996: 20-30). Humans speak not for social reasons, but in expressing their genetic nature (1976: 57-69; 1980: 229-30). Speech is the natural, autonomous output of a specialized computational mechanism — the ‘language organ’ — unique to Homo sapiens.

In his capacity as a natural scientist, Chomsky (1976: 186) sees people as ‘natural objects’, their language a ‘part of nature’. Linguistics ‘falls naturally within human biology’ (1976: 123). However, this is not biology as normally understood. Discussing the evolution of speech, Chomsky suggests: ‘The answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on earth…’ (1988: 167). Language’s features may be ‘simply emergent physical properties of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity under the specific conditions of human evolution’ (1991: 50). More recently, Chomsky (1998: 17) has speculated that ‘a mutation took place in the genetic instructions for the brain, which was then reorganized in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry to install a faculty of language’.

For Chomsky, linguistics can aspire to the precision of physics for a simple reason — language itself is a ‘natural object’ (2000: 106-33). As such, it approximates to a ‘perfect system’ — an optimal solution to the problem of relating sound and meaning. Biologists, according to Chomsky, do not expect such perfection, which is a distinctive hallmark of physics. He explains: ‘In the study of the inorganic world, for mysterious reasons, it has been a valuable heuristic to assume that things are very elegant and beautiful’. Chomsky (1996: 30) continues: ‘Recent work suggests that language is surprisingly "perfect" in this sense. ..Insofar as that is true, language seems unlike other objects of the biological world, which are typically a rather messy solution to some class of problems, given the physical constraints and the materials that history and accident have made available’. Language, according to Chomsky, lacks the messiness one would expect of an accumulation of accidents made good by evolutionary tinkering. Characterized by beauty bordering on perfection, it cannot have evolved in the normal biological way.

7.2 The Language Machine

On the eve of the computer-inspired ‘cognitive revolution’, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957) excited and inspired a new generation of linguists because it chimed in with the spirit of the times. The book treated language not as a mass of empirical facts about locally variable linguistic forms and traditions, but as the output of a mechanical device whose design could be precisely specified. In science, according to Chomsky, less is more. If a theory is sufficiently powerful and simple, it should radically reduce the amount of knowledge needed to understand the relevant facts. Syntactic Structures infuriated established linguists — and delighted as many iconoclasts — because its message was that much of the profession’s previous work had been a waste of time. Why laboriously collect and attempt to make sense of concrete, detailed observations as to how the world’s variegated languages are spoken, if a simplifying short cut is available? In an ice-cool, starkly logical argument that magisterially brushed aside most current linguistic theory, Syntactic Structures evaluated some conceivable ways of constructing the ultimate ‘language machine’ :

Suppose we have a machine that can be in anyone of a finite number of different internal states…the machine begins in the initial state, runs through a sequence of states (producing a word with each transition), and ends in the final state. Then we call the sequence of words that has been produced a ‘sentence’. Each such machine thus defines a certain language; namely the set of sentences that can be produced in this way. (Chomsky 1957: 18)

As his argument unfolds, Chomsky rules out this first, crude design for his envisaged machine — it clearly would not work. Then by a process of elimination, he progressively narrows the range of designs which — on purely theoretical grounds — ought to work. Thrillingly, he opens up the prospect of discovering in effect the ‘philosopher’s stone’ — the design specifications of a device capable of generating consistently grammatical sentences not only in English but, with appropriate modifications, in any language spoken (or capable of being spoken) on earth. This ultimate device, Chomsky reasons, must be the very one which, in real life, resides in the brain of every human being. Language, in this new perspective, is no longer a mass of variegated behavioural manifestations or locally observable regularities. It is the device enabling speaking to occur. The aim of linguistics is to expose this hidden object to view.

Chomsky’s (1996: 31) ultimate dream is to integrate linguistics into an expanded version of physics: ‘The world has many aspects: mechanical, chemical, optical, electrical and so on. Among these are its mental aspects. The thesis is that all should be studied in the same way, whether we areconsidering the motion of the planets, fields of force, structural formulas for complex molecules, or computational properties of the language faculty’. Consistently with this project, he defines language as ‘an individual phenomenon, a system represented in the mind/brain of a particular individual’ (1988: 36), contrasting this with the earlier view of language as ‘a social phenomenon, a shared property of a community’. Saussure (1974 (1915]: 14) wrote of langue: ‘It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community’. The problem with such usage, Chomsky (1988: 36-7) complains, is that it ‘involves obscure socio-political and normative factors’. His misgivings are clear. Where social factors are concerned, science must inevitably fail us. There simply cannot be a social science. Those who define language in social terms are therefore doomed to find the whole topic ‘obscure’.

Chomsky denies the relevance of social factors even when considering language acquisition by the human child. The infant’s linguistic capacities, he explains, cannot be taught. Instead, they must be ‘allowed to function in the way in which they are designed to develop’ (1988: 173). After briefly discussing this topic, he concludes: ‘I emphasized biological facts, and I didn’t say anything about historical and social facts. And I am going to say nothing about these elements in language acquisition. The reason is that I think they are relatively unimportant’ (1988: 173). Superficial irrelevancies aside, Chomsky views language acquisition as independent of experience: ‘No one would take seriously a proposal that the human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. Rather, it is taken for granted that the physical structure of the organism is genetically determined ….’(1976: 9-10). Human mental structures develop in the same way. ‘Acquisition of language’, concludes Chomsky (1988: 174), ‘is something that happens to you; it’s not something that you do. Learning language is something like undergoing puberty. You don’t learn to do it; you don’t do it because you see other people doing it; you are just designed to do it at a certain time’.

7. 3. A Stimulating and Loving Environment

Almost in the same breath, however, Chomsky makes an admission that appears striking in its humanity and self-evident force — and equally in itslack of fit with his other claims. ‘Now a good system of raising children’, he observes (1988: 173), ‘puts them in a stimulating, loving environment in which their natural capacities will be able to flourish:

This innocent-seeming observation in fact poses a puzzle. If experience is of secondary significance, why should it be important to love the child? Of course, without food and protection, the child may die. And without stimulation, its language organ may not develop. But beyond such basic necessities, what does Chomsky mean by a ‘loving’ environment? His thinking is clarified when he imagines the alternative possibility: ‘Now let’s take a human child which is raised in an orphanage, and let’s suppose the child is given the right medical care and food and has normal experience with the physical world. Nevertheless the child may be very restricted in its abilities. In fact, it may not learn the language properly’ (ibid.). Chomsky does not quite specify the problem with this nameless institution. But he leaves us in little doubt. The child is afforded a physically secure yet non-loving, non- stimulating environment. Consequently, its natural capacities may not flourish. Chomsky here comes close to conceding that asocial factor-namely, insufficient caring interaction or ‘love’ — might prevent an otherwise normal child from acquiring language despite its genetic endowment.

Let us agree, for the sake of argument, that language acquisition indeed depends on a ‘loving, stimulating environment’. The suggestion seems hardly controversial. But what are the features required for an environment to count as ‘loving’? Although he assumes some threshold level of linguistic stimulation, Chomsky has shown little interest in such ‘external’ issues. Developmental psychologists and anthropologists, however, have amassed detailed knowledge concerning precisely the conditions under which a human child — under varying cultural conditions — will optimally internalize its natal language (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984).A related body of research has revealed that even apes may acquire limited symbolic competence if cared for in humanlike ways (Savage-Rumbaugh and Rumbaugh 1993; Tomasello et al. 1993). Overall, the evidence suggests that co-operative mind-reading — the solicitous interest of others — is indeed a critical variable in enabling normal linguistic competence to be acquired.

When happy in its social surroundings, a baby’s playful gestures may communicate details of its cognitive states. When unhappy, it expresses mainly emotional and physiological states (Trevarthen 1979: 347n.). A child pointing and gesturing for an apple within its mother’s reach might naturally expect her to respond helpfully, preferably by providing the apple (Lock 1993: Fig. 12.1). But imagine a hungry mother whose response was to eat the desired item herself. The child would soon abandon cognitive transparency in favour of cries, attempts at physical snatching — or eventual silent withdrawal. Lack of a ‘stimulating, loving environment’ would in this way block the child’s linguistic development.

Admittedly, such mother-infant competition would appear unusual, at least among humans. But what about other species? All mammals nurse their young, and most primates carry them, too. But primate mothers — differing in this respect from Kanzi’s loving human carers (Savage-Rumbaugh and Rumbaugh 1993) — rarely offer foraging assistance after weaning. Macaque mothers in South India take food directly out of their infants’ hands and mouths (Simonds 1965). Goodall (1990: 166) describes a chimpanzee mother who not only displaced her daughter from a termite-fishing nest but also seized the young female’s tool for her own use.

Wild-living primates also appear relatively reluctant to share information of obvious value to their young. How should this be explained? Barbara King (1994) addressed this problem in her book, The Information Continuum. Her aim in this volume was to show that ‘no critical watershed in social information transfer separates primates and humans’ (p. 7). As her research proceeded, however, she encountered an unexpected result. Rarely do wild-living apes use volitional signals to donate foraging-related information to one another. Mothers often appear reluctant to give such information even to their own offspring. King comments: ‘Adults do sometimes donate information to immatures …[but] it is puzzling that such instances are so infrequent. If a mother could help her offspring by donating information to it at relatively little cost to herself, why doesn’t she? Primatologists have no true understanding of this situation’ (p. 6).

Such apparent selfishness does indeed seem anomalous — but only if we accept human levels of trust and sociality as the norm. We naturally expect humans to seek social recognition by learning to speak in relevant ways (Dessalles 1998). But an ape intentionally divulging relevant information in public might lose rather than gain in status, as others took advantage of its honesty. Adult chimpanzees, admittedly, do emit co-operative signals — such as food-calls (Wrangham 1977). But, being irrepressible, these excited sounds are interpreted by listeners as audible evidence of the presence of food, regardless of cognitive intentions. The intention behind a food call would be of little interest to others. Ape facial expressions are potentially more transparent in this respect. By human standards, however, they remain inscrutable. In all primates except humans, the sclera — the tissue surrounding the dark-coloured iris of the eye — is dark rather than light or white. The consequent lack of contrast makes it difficult for others to infer direction of gaze (Kobayashi and Kohshima 2001). Like mobsters wearing sunglasses, mature apes are experts at being poker-faced, displaying no enthusiasm at all for having their minds read too easily (de Waal1982 ) .

A female gorilla was travelling in a party when she noticed a clump of edible vine. She paused as if intending to groom herself. When the others had unsuspectingly moved on, she took advantage of their ignorance — and ate the whole quantity undisturbed (Savage-Rumbaugh and McDonald 1988: 225, citing Fossey). This ape’s intelligence led her to avoid divulging relevant information to others in her group. In pursuing this strategy, she faced minimal social costs. Even had her duplicity been exposed, she might have lost some share of the food — but not status in the eyes of her community. Primate social status is quite straightforwardly consistent with concealing relevant information. Why, then, should an ape mother foster in her offspring qualities such as honesty and transparency? These are human moral values, not those of Machiavellian primate politics (cf. Byrne and Whiten 1988).

Admittedly, apes are not simply Machiavellian as in ‘completely unscrupulous’ — they may display sociable impulses, including many suggestive of human ‘moral’ sensibilities (de Waal 1996). Still, the global political order remains founded on other principles. In all animals, effective parenting entails equipping the young to reach reproductive maturity, preparing them for the competitive challenges they may later face. To a human parent, donating relevant information to young offspring might appear unconditionally adaptive. But imagine a world in which adult success depended on primate-style competition for dominance. Would it then be adaptive to encourage dependency on easy-to-fake information received second-hand? Where group-level moral principles are non-existent, it may be best to leave youngsters to fend for themselves — as ape mothers indeed appear to do.

7.4 Signal Evolution: The Social Background

Human sobs tend automatically to trigger tears; laughter is intrinsically contagious. In such cases, stimulus and response are not cognitively mediated; little intellectual choice is involved. If only to facilitate deception, however, both primates and humans require at least some element of cognitive control over their species-specific ‘gesture/ calls’ (Burling 1993), and such capacities have in many cases evolved. But there is always a paradox here. What is the value to anyone of a patently false smile? To be cognitively controlled is to be suspect — if a sign can be manipulated, it can be faked. Even where control is theoretically possible, therefore, the need to inspire trust will prompt signallers to fall back on more ‘primitive’ performances that are impossible to fake. Where trust cannot be assumed but must be generated via the signalling activity itself, cognitive control over signal-emission must inevitably be selected against (Knight 1998, 1999,2000).

Much more than other primates, humans rely on signals that are patent fakes. ‘Mimesis’ is the term given by Donald (1991) to a category of signals lying somewhere between hard-to-fake primate gesture/ calls and speechlike arbitrary signs. Mimetic culture, in Donald’s terms, consists of emotionally expressive signals that to an extent can be deliberately manipulated — ‘faked’. Professional actors learn how to do this as part of their trade, but all humans can ‘act’ within limits. There is something socially provocative and risky about such signalling, however. The difficulty is that although fake sobs or tears may be switched on and off at will, human evolved responses remain to an extent emotionally governed and irrepressible. To drop one’s guard when others are faking is to risk being seriously manipulated and controlled.

If ‘information’ is defined as ‘that which permits choices to be made’ (Smith 1977: 2), mimesis is not straightforwardly informative. Music, song, dance, and other forms of art tug at the emotions, seducing and in other ways persuading the target audience in manners that may seem cognitively unfair. To those in the know, however, collaborative faking can build confidence between the actors precisely because of the emotional and energetic costs entailed (cf. Power 1998, 2000). Among human hunter-gatherers, fiction-generating emotional performances — particularly initiation rituals — are staged to cement bonds and generate in-group confidence rather than to widen or enhance cognitive choice (Knight 1999).

Young children become immersed in mimesis from an early age. In middle-class Western nuclear family contexts (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984), a mother’s songlike communication with her infant is not fundamentally informative. Instead, the typically exaggerated prosody has an instrumental function — the sounds have acoustic properties well designed to arouse, alert, soothe, or otherwise directly influence the child’s psychology (Fernald 1992). In hunter-gatherer and other traditional cultures, child-rearing practices may differ substantially, yet functions of social bonding and control remain central to pre-verbal communication. Ritual ordeals experienced later in life — including initiation rites — are in a similar sense meaningful yet linguistically uninformative, being aimed more at narrowing personal choices than widening them (Power 2000; Rappaport 1999).

Speech is quite different, both in form and function. To the extent that infant-directed vocalizing becomes linguistic, something new and distinctively human begins to occur. In addition to alerting, soothing, or otherwise manipulating the infant’s responses, the newly comprehensible words and sentences begin to affect cognition, dispassionately communicating aspects of the speaker’s thought. Assuming the listener can make use of this information, its behavioural choices are thereby widened, not narrowed.

Dessalles (1998) has described how such contributions are valued and rewarded within human speech communities. Listeners motivate speakers to be ‘relevant’ by allocating status on that basis. Competition for linguistic status differs subtly yet fundamentally from primate-style competition for dominance. The key distinction is that linguistic status is assigned by the speaker’s coalition or peer group, not extracted by physical, social, or resource-holding dominance at others’ expense. An inescapably moral distinction is entailed here. ‘When competing for relevance and for status’, Dessalles (2000: 78) writes, ‘individuals behave for the good of the group: The most successful speakers are those best able to contribute — directly or indirectly — to in-group co-operative decision-making. Competition of this kind may be described, paradoxically, as ‘competition to co-operate’.

The human child, correspondingly, acquires speech within a supportive and interactive milieu quite unlike the environment to which a young primate must adapt. In nurturing speech in the growing child, caregivers including playmates must display interests stretching beyond motives of one-sided manipulation or control. Far from striving to limit one another’s behavioural choices, successful conversationalists must learn to widen them. In pursuing this goal, they typically exchange roles, rewarding their mutual co-operation, as each responds informatively to the other’s intentionally transparent moves. The infant’s part in all this begins with gurgling, mutual eye-contact, and smiling, develops into babbling, laughter, and imaginative play — and culminates in syntactically complex speech (Bates et al. 1979; Locke 1993). Such social engagement is not merely an external ‘environment: The intersubjectivity involved here is internal to and constitutive of the child’s developing speech (Tomasello 1996).

7.5 Conventional Signalling among Primates

Animal signals are typically ‘exaptations’ (Gould and Vrba 1982) or ‘derived activities’ (Tinbergen 1952). Over evolutionary time, certain aspects of non-communicative behaviour assume a signalling function, becoming correspondingly specialized through a process known as ‘ritualization’. Signal evolution begins when others read some aspect of normal behaviour as significant. If the subject of such surveillance can benefit from having its mind read or its behaviour anticipated, then over evolutionary time natural selection will accentuate the cues, reducing any ambiguity. By definition, such phylogenetic ritualization entails special elaboration and added costs.

The term ‘ontogenetic ritualization’ (Tomasello and Call 1997) has recently been coined to denote the learning-based process through which two or more individuals, following repeated encounters, may reduce a volitional gesture used in social interaction to a mutually understood shorthand. Since the final version in this case is actually less costly and elaborate than the original, I propose (following Burling 2000) to avoid the potentially confusing term ‘ritualization’ here, referring instead simply to ‘conventionalization’.

Very often, the context of primate conventionalization is play (cf. Knight 2000). A juvenile chimp, for example, may slap an adult on the head while jumping onto its body. Suppose the juvenile regularly starts this game by raising one hand as if preparing to slap. On next recognizing this gesture, the adult may anticipate the whole performance, responding accordingly. Conventionalization is accomplished when, anticipating such comprehension, the juvenile raises its hand in a merely tokenistic way, no longer to perform the physical act of slapping but ‘symbolically’ — to invite participation in the game (Tomasello and Call 1997: 299-300).

In addition to co-operative play, the mother-infant nursing context may allow conventional signals to emerge. The chimpanzee infant ‘nursing poke’ (Tomasello et al. 1994) begins as a functional action: the infant pushes aside its mother’s arm to reach her nipple. As mother and infant interact with one another over time, the poke becomes abbreviated, gradually assuming a unique, idiosyncratic form. Before long, the infant is tweaking or stroking its mother in its own special way, the shorthand now mutually understood as a request to suckle. The relation between the modified signal’s form and its meaning is now partly dependent on agreement. Such conventionalization occurs because each infant has an interest in cutting the costs of requesting a feed, while mothers have a corresponding motive to satisfy their offspring while reducing the amount of poking endured. The outcome is a learned, intentional, discrete shorthand, falling outside the normal species-specific repertoire of emotionally expressive, hard-to-fake gesture-calls.

Conventionalization occurs when interests on both sides coincide, allowing tokenistic signalling to replace costly action or indexical display. Among primates, however, the tokens involved are of restricted scope. The nursing poke has no prospect of becoming circulated beyond the specific mother- infant relationship in which it first emerges. Each mother-infant dyad must re-invent the wheel, as it were, arriving independently at its own idiosyncratic version of the poke. Destined to survive only until that particular infant is weaned, each such token, correspondingly, has no prospect of becoming a cultural replicator or meme (cf. Dawkins 1989).

The nursing-poke and the raised-hand play-invitation are instances of volitional primate signalling displaying an element of conventionalization. Other possible examples are the head nod, head shake, wrist flap, and tap/ poke-cognitively expressive gestures, each with its own meaning, used by immature apes in their playful interactions with one another (Blount 1990: 429). During sex, male bonobos may use a pointing gesture to direct females into the desired position (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1977). Arguably, this is shorthand for actually pushing the female into place. More subtle pointing through orientation of the head or eyes may play a role in other intimate relations between apes. But such signals are unlikely to become socially circulated or transmitted between generations in conventional form.

Where trust is not extended throughout a coalition or community, associated conventional signalling cannot be extended either. Instead, conventional signals will be confined within isolated, restricted pockets of social space where sufficient trust momentarily prevails. In their capacity as incipient memes, therefore, such signals lack prospects of achieving immortality. They may evolve, but without leaving any descendants. Consequently, neither linguistic nor more general symbolic cultural evolution can get under way.

7.6 Darwinian Versus Mechanistic Explanations of Language Origins

Why do chimpanzees not capitalize on the potential for symbolic communication which they evidently possess? The reasons are social. With apes as with humans, it is political conflict and anxiety — not individual ‘nature’ — that sets limits on the scope for playfulness and creativity in social interaction. Young apes engaged in playful antics are clearly enjoying themselves. Bonobos of all ages use sexual playas a means of bonding, particularly in relationships between females (Parish 1996). But among primates generally, scheming within a Machiavellian political framework (Byrne and Whiten 1988) sets up anxieties, conflicts, and corresponding defensive alliances which permeate and effectively constitute adult sociality at the global level. In the absence of any public framework for enforcing ‘morality’, the onset of sexual maturity confronts individuals with the Darwinian imperative to engage in potentially traumatic conflict with in-group conspecifics. If playfulness becomes less frequent as ape youngsters mature, it is because autonomous, freely creative expressivity is simply not compatible with a situation in which individuals feel sexually or in other ways anxious or threatened (Knight 2000).

If this is accepted, then the transition from primate gesture/call to linguistic sign was driven less by the emergence of novel mechanisms than by the evolution of novel strategies of social co-operation. Few today would wish to deny Chomsky’s main point — humans, unlike apes, come into the world with genetically determined linguistic potential. But early Homo must also have possessed remarkable symbol-using capacities, long before speech as we know it had evolved. Bonobos such as Kanzi (Savage-Rumbaugh and Rumbaugh 1993) have demonstrated their ability to deploy and act upon conventional signs — if their human caregivers can be relied on to reward such behaviour. In the case of evolving humans, there were of course no external caregivers to give the necessary rewards. Rather, speakers and listeners had to place trust in one another in ways that would be maladaptive under conditions of Machiavellian primate politics.

7.7 The Human Symbolic Revolution

Deacon (1997) argues that language evolution was rooted in novel requirements for communication about social contracts. Non-human primates, in this view, are under no pressure to speak. Needing to communicate only about the currently perceptible world, an ape can always draw attention to some symptom or likeness of the intended referent. But a contract, Deacon observes, exists only as an idea shared among those committed to honouring and enforcing it. How, then, might information about it be conveyed? Since physical correlates — indices — in this case do not exist, Deacon argues that the only way to convey information about a contract would have been to establish a suitable symbol. This symbol — he suggests — would be likely to derive from some ritual action involved in cementing the contract (as a wedding ring might come to symbolize ‘marriage’). With recurrent use, such ritual symbols became reduced to shorthands and eventually to words.

Using different lines of reasoning, Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995: 279-309) are persuasive in linking the evolution of language with the emergence of social co-operation at the level of the group, viewing this in turn as based on ritually cemented contractual understandings. Drawing on these insights, can we construct a model testable in the light of archaeological, palaeontological, genetic, and ethnographic data? The ancestors of modern humans had long monitored events in the physical and biological worlds, and additionally must have possessed sophisticated ‘mind-reading’ powers. But no amount of mind-reading ability will enable one to see a ‘spirit’. How and why, then, did our ancestors shift to a novel cognitive preoccupation with ‘institutional facts’ (Searle 1996) — that is, with a domain of contractual fictions such as ‘gods and underworlds’ (Chase 1994)? According to one recent Darwinian model (Power and Aiello 1997; Power 1998, 1999), ‘sham menstruation’ (more usually known as ‘female initiation’) was a fiction-generating strategy in which newly fertile females were bonded in coalitionary alliance with their pregnant and nursing mothers, sisters, and other kin. I favour this model because, unlike some others that have been proposed, it sets out from premises in modern Darwinian theory.

As brain size increased dramatically during the later phases of human evolution, the heavily child-burdened human female needed to avoid being made pregnant and then abandoned by her mate. Females who secured increasing levels of continuous investment from males had improved fitness. A popular hypothesis in this context is that females solved their problems through ‘sham oestrus’ (Hill 1982). The evolving human female ceased to restrict sexual activity to the period around ovulation, instead dampening ‘oestrus’ and extending her receptivity beyond the fertile period. By with-holding precise information about her true periods of fertility, the human female kept her mate sexually interested over an increasingly extended period.

Sham menstruation builds on this idea, but gives it an additional twist. Even where females have evolved continuous sexual receptivity, they still risk being exploited by philandering males. Once ovulation signals have been phased out, menstruation becomes one of the few indicators of fertility to remain externally detectable. This may help explain the extraordinary attention focused upon it in virtually all hunter-gatherer and other traditional cultures (Knight 1996). The human female menstruates considerably more copiously than any other primate. Unless countermeasures are taken, this risks divulging information that would allow philanderers to discriminate against pregnant or nursing mothers in favour of females who are visibly cycling — hence potentially available to be impregnated in the near future. Unless cultural factors intervene, we would expect a philanderer to monitor such information, attempting to seduce an imminently fertile (cycling) female at the expense of his already impregnated mate. This threat — according to sham menstruation theory — provides the stimulus in response to which symbolic culture emerges. Recall that by starting to menstruate, a young female divulges her imminent fertility, attracting corresponding male attention. We would predict that pregnant and nursing females in the vicinity might perceive this as a threat. In the counter-strategy envisaged by Power and Aiello (1997), these females take collective action to deal with this threat. It would be difficult to hide the young female, denying her condition or existence. Hiding her would also mean failing to exploit her attractions-her potential value in extracting additional mating effort from males. Instead of hiding her, therefore, the young woman’s real and/or fictional mothers, aunts, and sisters do just the reverse. Publicly advertising her condition, they seek by proximity to identify with her ‘imminent fertility’ and corresponding attractions. Bonding together closely, the young woman’s female kin temporarily bar male sexual access to her and scramble her signal, packaging the released information in a form that philanderers cannot use.

Painting up with ‘blood’, the kinswomen dance and in other ways act in synchrony, asserting themselves as inseparable from their menstruating ‘sister’. Defending against the threat of harassment, they draw jointly on their own and one another’s male kin for support. As ‘brothers’ consequently become involved in physically defending their ‘sisters’, would-be philanderers are deterred from picking and choosing between one female and the next on the basis of biological signals. The fiction is broadcast that everyone just now is imminently fertile. Sexual harassment or violence remains, of course, an option for would-be philanderers. But under the new conditions, sexual rewards can more easily be earned by going away hunting and returning to camp with supplies of meat. In the arrangement that now begins to emerge — known ethnographically as ‘bride-service’ — meat from the hunt is handed to senior figures within the bride’s coalition. They then redistribute it among close and distant kin. To maximize provisions thereby obtained, kin-bonded females should logically maximize joint access to multiple in-married males. This in turn means ensuring that any male who already has a sexual partner is barred from monopolizing access to additional mates. Ideally, each young woman as she comes of age should bring in at least one additional ‘bridegroom’ — preferably a young man with a good reputation as a hunter.

For intrinsic reasons — since outgroup male harassment may at any time be attempted — this strategy must involve coalitionary control over women’s bodies and availability (cf. Knight 1991: 122-53). This in turn depends on one fundamental precondition. When any female is signalling sexual resistance, her kin — both male and female — must support her in this and ensure that her message is understood. Females must schedule their action to maxi- mum effect, appealing to male kin as necessary, synchronizing with sisters and ensuring that signals are salient and unambiguous. As each young female comes of age, she must be decisively and permanently initiated into the same coalition-based strategy.

Against this background, we can derive a prediction about the precise form of the basic cultural replicator or meme (cf. Dawkins 1989). The expected signature of sexual resistance can be inferred by recalling its theoretical antithesis in the form of primate sexual soliciting. We may conduct this reasoning in two steps:

1. A chimpanzee in oestrus signals her availability with a prominent genital swelling. This is a competitive signal, advertising to males in the vicinity that she is of the right (same) species, the right (different) sex — and that this is the right (fertile) time.
2. On this basis, sexual resistance should be displayed by collectively signal- ling wrong sex (male), wrong species (animal) and wrong time (menstruating).

Matching these predictions, gender- and species-ambivalent performances are in many traditions intrinsic to women’s ‘rituals of rebellion’ (e.g. Gluckman 1954/1963). Throughout sub-Saharan Africa , females on such occasions paint up with cosmetics — especially brilliant reds — simultaneously playing male and/or animal roles (Power 2000). Cross-culturally, hunter-gatherer initiation ceremonies establish sexual inviolability in comparable ways (Knight et al. 1995; Power and Watts 1997).

Associated with the earliest appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens in sub-Saharan Africa — dating to between 100,000 and 130,000 years ago — archaeologists report evidence for the deliberate mining, selection, treatment, and artistic application of red ochre pigments. Arguably, this is evidence for the world’s first ‘art’ (Watts 1999). Drawing on ethnographic data from the same region, the red ochre pigments have been interpreted as connoting blood, fertility, and the supernatural potency so widely attributed to menstruation (Power and Watts 1997; Watts 1999). Examples of more recent local rock art include therianthropes — creatures in which human and animal features are combined (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1989). Khoisan traditions are of particular significance, since in their case strands of cultural, including ritual, continuity evidently stretch back into the Middle Stone Age (Watts 1999). In the Kalahari, a Ju/’hoansi maiden still celebrates her first menstruation by ceremonially bonding with female kin. While bleeding, she adopts the identity of the Eland Bull. Central to belief about this mythical creature is that he enjoys sexual relations with his multiple ‘wives’ — the maiden’s kinswomen acting the part of eland cows. During the Eland Bull Dance — the ceremony held to celebrate a girl’s first menstruation — such fictional sex is acted out by all concerned (Lewis-Williams 1981). Other hunter-gatherer representations of divinity — such as the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Snake — illustrate the same logic of gender and species reversal (Knight 1983, 1988).

The ‘human revolution’ became consummated as coalitionary resistance to philandering drove up the costs of ‘selfish’ male strategies to the point where they were no longer affordable. With this source of internal conflict removed, enhanced community-wide trust transformed the context in which communication occurred. We have seen that signals may become conventionalized wherever trusting listeners can be assumed. The establishment of stable, ‘blood’-symbolized kin-coalitions allowed ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ to trust one another as never before. Signallers no longer needed to ground each communicative performance in hard-to-fake displays whose intrinsic features inspired trust. Trust, in other words, no longer had to be generated signal by signal — it could be assumed. With this problem removed, even patent fictions could now be valued as evidence from which to reconstruct others’ thoughts. Language consists entirely of fictions of this kind. Humans who had undergone the revolution, then, no longer had to stage a ‘song and dance’ each time they needed to appear persuasive. Costly ritual performance remained necessary, but only because each individual’s initiation into and subsequent commitment to the speech community could be signalled in no other way. Once such commitment had already been displayed, coalition members could cut their costs, replacing indexical display with a repertoire of conventionally agreed shorthands (see Knight 1998, 1999, 2000). Since these low-cost abbreviations — ‘words’ or ‘protowords’ — were tokens in the first instance of group-level contractual phenomena, they could be honest without having to be grounded in anything real. Reality-defying performances upholding community-wide moral contracts are familiar to anthropologists as ‘religion’ (Rappaport 1999). Once humans had established such traditions, they found themselves communicating within a shared moral universe — a socially constructed virtual reality — of their own making.

7.8 Summary and conclusion

Chimpanzees have significant untapped potential for symbolic communication. During infancy, rudimentary symbolic skills may serve purposes in playful and mother-infant contexts. But with the approach of sexual maturity, such skills become increasingly marginal. Only if trusting, playful, and solicitous relationships were central in the struggle for adult reproductive success would mothers enhance their fitness by fostering sophisticated symbolic dependency in their offspring. As things are, chimpanzee mothers refrain from any such inappropriate parenting. Instead, chimpanzee infants are taught that most valuable of all lessons — how to fend for themselves.

Human children learn a different lesson. In their case, the importance of play is not that it prepares for an adult life of competitive conflict. It prepares instead for a life of engagement with symbols. In the human case, it is as if communal pretend-play were not confined to childhood but — in novel forms such as art, ritual, and religion — had become extended into adult life. Creative, playful, and imaginative symbolic performance is central to human social competence, playing a key role in alliance- formation, sexual courtship and reproductive success (Knight 1999; Miller 1999; Power 1999).

Social theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 430) derides Chomsky’s model of a ‘homogenous speech community’, terming it the ‘illusion of linguistic communism’. But this may be too dismissive. Chomsky identifies human linguistic creativity with social and political freedom. He is entitled to argue that where performance is distorted by external factors such as conflict or social inequality, these aberrations should not distort our picture of human speech as such. Anthropologists have confirmed that structures of one-sided political dominance indeed obstruct syntactical creativity, driving speakers to resort to syntactically impoverished, repetitive verbal clichés (Bloch 1975). During social revolutions, by contrast, as authoritarian pretensions are punctured through gossip, humour, and political conspiracy, the full creative possibilities of speech become explored.

The scenario I favour is that speech emerged out of a social revolution (Knight 1991, 1998, 1999, 2000; Knight et al. 1995). Consummated in sub- Saharan Africa some 130,000 years ago (Watts 1999), it inaugurated the most successful and stable system of human social organization to date — the egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle. ‘Communism in living’ (Morgan 1881; Lee 1988) afforded ideal conditions for language’s rapid evolution. In freeing our ancestors from their former competitive anxieties, it liberated human potential. Far from being marginal or external, as Chomsky suggests, distinctively human social strategies in this way gave rise to distinctively human speech.

FURTHER READING

DEACON, TERRENCE (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain (London : Penguin). (Social contracts and the origins of language.)

DUNBAR ,ROBIN, KNIGHT, CHRIS, and POWER, CAMILLA (1999) (eds.), The Evolution of Culture (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press). (Interdisciplinary debates on the origins of language and symbolic culture. )

KNIGHT, CHRIS (1991), Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (New Haven and London : Yale University Press). (The human revolution.)

KOHN, MAREK (1999), As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind (London : Granta). (Socialist politics and modern Darwinism.)

MAYNARD SMITH, JOHN, and SZATHMARY, EÖRS (1995), The Major Transitions in Evolution (New York : W. H. Freeman). (The transition to speech and social con- tracts was one of a series of major transitions punctuating the story of life on earth.)

DE WAAL , FRANZ (1996), Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge , Mass. : Harvard University Press). (Do apes have morals?)

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From The Transition to Language, ed Alison Wray. 2002.

Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. ISBN 0 199 25066 9.

Click to download Editor’s Introduction: Language: A Darwinian Adaptation? [PDF 76KB]

From The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: social function and the origins of linguistic form, eds Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R Hurford. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 0 521 78696 7. 2000

The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters — and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and music, and language and dance. It also provides an explanation for the obvious fact that so much in language is non-optimal for purposes of communicating cognitive information. Morris Halle (1975: 528)

Primate vocalisations are irrepressible, context-bound indices of emotional states, in some cases conveying additional information about the sender’s condition, status and/or local environment. Speech has a quite different function: it permits communication of information concerning a shared, conceptual environment — a world of intangibles independent of currently perceptible reality.

A suite of formal discontinuities are bound up with this fundamental functional contrast. Whereas primate vocalisations are not easily faked, human speech signals are cognitively controlled, linked arbitrarily to their referents and ‘displaced’ – hence immune from contextual corroboration (Burling 1993). The meanings of primate gestures/calls are evaluated on an analog, ‘more/less’ scale; speech signals are digitally processed (Burling 1993). When combined, primate signals and associated meanings blend and grade into one another; the basic elements of speech are discrete/particulate (Abler 1989; Studdert Kennedy 1998). Primate recipients evaluate details of signalling performance; in speech, the focus is on underlying intentions, with listeners compensating for deficiencies in performance (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986). Primate vocal signals prompt reflex responses; in speech, computational processes mediate between signal and message (Deacon 1997).

If primate calls do not reflect details of cognition, we may ask how it became possible in the human case for vocalisations to express conceptual processes? Insofar as a chimpanzee may be said to think in concepts, conveying these will involve facial expression, position, posture and bodily motion (Köhler 1927; Menzel 1971; Plooij 1978). Humans intuitively use the same method: when an initially functional action is replayed for purposes of communication, success is achieved through direct iconic expression of the thought (McNeill 1992). For either species, it is much simpler and more effective to involve any or all manipulable parts of the body rather than accept restriction to just hands, or just voice.

Against this background, one school of thought concludes that in the absence of a conventional code, humanity’s earliest signs can only have worked as gestural replicas or icons (Hewes 1973; Kendon 1991; Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox 1995). During the course of human evolution — so runs the basic argument — thought gestures of the kind occasionally observed among apes (Köhler 1927; Plooij 1978) become habitually deployed. Through frequent use, these become curtailed and conventionalised, leading eventually to a system of arbitrary signs.

Recently established sign languages illustrate how iconic gestures become reduced to conventionalised shorthands, sometimes within a generation (Kegl, Senghas and Coppola 1998). Even following conventionalisation, sign languages remain more iconic than spoken ones. Yet they exhibit essentially the same hierarchical, embedded structure as spoken language, and are acquired by children just as naturally (Bellugi and Klima 1975, 1982). It appears, then, that the ‘language organ’ central to Chomskyan theory works as well with visuo-manual gesture as with sound. Had the evolution of syntactical competence been driven by motor control for vocal communication, as argued by Lieberman (1985), this outcome would seem difficult to explain. Even in spoken language, syntax remains to a significant extent iconic (Haiman 1985), leading Givón (1985: 214) to treat iconicity as ‘the truly general case in the coding, representation and communication of experience’, arbitrary convention being ‘a mere extreme case on the iconic scale’. Acceptance of this principle logically excludes a vocal origin for the representational functions of language: apart from the special case of sound symbolism or onomatopoeia, it is not easy to see how iconic resemblances can be made using sound alone.

But if a language of visual signs was initially adaptive, why would it subsequently have been phased out? By comparison with manual signing, vocal communication saves time and energy, liberates the hands for other tasks and is effective around corners or in the dark. Proponents of an originally gestural modality explain the transition to a vocal one in these terms. But, asks MacNeilage (1998: 232), if the advantages of vocalising are so decisive, how and why did visuomanual gesture take precedence in the first place? Why start with an inefficient modality and then switch to an efficient one? Why not resort to the appropriate modality from the outset? For MacNeilage, the gestural theory encounters ‘an insuperable problem’ at this point (1998: 232).

A further difficulty — according to MacNeilage — is that few entities in the real world allow a natural linkage between iconic gestures in both visual and vocal modalities. Admittedly, one might represent ‘lion’ by pouncing and roaring. Translation into a purely vocal medium is here straightforward: just omit the pounce. However, most referents are not iconically identifiable by sound. Iconic signing, moreover, exploits spatial dimensionality, an option not available in vocal-auditory signalling. This in turn implies very different principles of phonological organisation in the two modalities. Given the associated translation problems, how could the posited modality switch to vocal speech have occurred?

On the basis of such objections, MacNeilage (1998: 238) makes the strong claim that ‘the vocal-auditory modality of spoken language was the first and only output mechanism for language’. This coincides with Dunbar ’s (1996: 141) view that gesture was never necessary — ‘it can all be done by voice’.

Statements of this kind, however, pose the central question of precisely how it could all be done? At what point and through which mechanisms did it become technically feasible to communicate details of conceptual thinking by exclusively vocal means?

Precursors of Compositional Speech

Prominent recent models of the evolution of speech suggest a two-stage process beginning with the appearance of referentially functional ‘words’. In Bickerton’s (1996: 51) view, ‘syntax could not have come into existence until there was a sizeable vocabulary whose units could be organized into complex Structures’. Studdert-Kennedy (1998) likewise considers words to have emerged at an early stage. In his view, it was a steady increase in the size of the ancestral population’s vocabulary which necessitated the radical restructuring of the vocal apparatus characteristic of modern Homo sapiens (Lieberman 1984).

Such models begin with a simple, limited lexicon, and then derive complexity from vocabulary expansion and related challenges premised upon the prior existence of words. The basic reasoning (cf. Studdert-Kennedy 1998) is as follows. Ancestral speakers increasingly needed multiple semantic distinctions, but had only limited articulatory resources to achieve this. Some primate species possess up to 30 holistically distinct vocalisations, each with its special meaning. Humans required more than this. The solution was to independently recycle the components of formerly holistic signals. This involved reduplicating each signal with variability at only certain positions — as in ‘flim-flam’ or ‘higgledy-piggledy’. If just one component – say, the initial consonant – could be varied, while holding the remainder invariant, this would allow a vastly expanded lexicon. The argument is that during human evolution, this ‘particulate’ principle increasingly supplanted the ‘holistic’ principle of primate signalling. The development drove changes in physiology and anatomy allowing vocalisers to control lip muscles independently of tongue muscles, these independently of the soft palate and so on. The human vocal tract was in this way progressively differentiated into independently controllable parts (Studdert-Kennedy 1998: 208—209).

Note that in this scenario, ‘words’ are already being used before the evolution of the distinctively human vocal apparatus, hence prior to any correspondingly enhanced competence in differentiating syllables. Studdert-Kennedy (1998: 211) acknowledges that this evolutionary sequence bears no relationship to the stages through which children pass in acquiring speech:

If the assumption that differentiation of the hominid protosyllable evolved in response to pressure for increased vocabulary is correct, the onset of differentiation before the first words in modern children must be a relatively late evolutionary novelty, selected and inserted into the developmental sequence for whatever facilitatory effect it may have on later processes of differentiation.

Studdert-Kennedy, then, acknowledges that his model addresses one issue only to face us with an additional puzzle. If evolving humans first used words and only then began differentiating syllables, why is it that children nowadays do just the opposite, first learning to differentiate syllables and only then deploying words?

Children start babbling at an early age, when they are also displaying capacities for thinking. But at first, these two activities – babbling and thinking – remain unconnected. The infant is not thinking through its babbling. Then, at about age two, ‘the curves of development’ of intellect and transmission, previously separate, ‘meet and join to initiate a new form of behavior’ (Vygotsky 1986: 82). As the child’s cognitive faculties gain control over the former babbling vocal transmission system, thought at last becomes verbal while trans-mission becomes intellectual. Speech is the result.

By comparison with primates, birds often display remarkable vocal ability, yet outputs lack cognitive significance (Marler 1998). As in the case of animal communication generally, cognition and vocal transmission never meet. Although this can be explained by reference to neurophysiological deficits, fundamentally the reasons are social. Cognition and communication are intrinsically divergent functions, subject to radically contrasting Darwinian selection pressures (Ulbaek 1998). Cognition is likely to enhance fitness even where social strategies are individualistically competitive; this is not true of communication. Why share valuable information with competitors who may turn out to be direct rivals? Why pass over reliable sensory evidence in favour of information received only second-hand? In resisting deception, animals respond preferentially to signals whose intrinsically hard-to-fake characteristics guarantee their reliability. This sets up selection pressures against evolution in the direction of speech.

But what if the signals simply don’t matter? Suppose certain internal variations within a primate vocal sequence reflect intentional manipulation expressed only as ‘idle play’. Provided no risks are entailed, conspecifics might respond with relaxed ‘play’ vocalisations of their own. If such call-and-response exchanges served bonding functions, sophisticated capacities for detecting and producing signal variety might evolve. We would then have the paradox that signals could be intentionally manipulated, but only on condition that little of social importance was conveyed.

This idea may have wider application than has previously been suspected. Gelada monkeys accompany their relaxed, ‘friendly’ social interactions with a wide range of subtly different vocalisations (Richman 1976, 1987). These include nasalised grunts, long, melodically complex inhalations, stop consonants, fricatives and glides, a range of vowel quality differences, tight voicing, muffled voicing, pitch variations and so forth. Geladas also employ a variety of rhythms and melodies. Rhythms may be fast, slow, staccato, glissando, first-beat accented or end-accented. Melodies may have evenly spaced musical intervals covering a range of two or three octaves.

Moreover, geladas in groups accurately synchronise their complex and varied vocalisations (Richman 1978). This ability is remarkable, for it involves high- speed modulation of the signal stream in response to conspecifics’ anticipated contributions to each rhythmic sequence, with vocalisers switching between digitally contrastive alternatives. In human speech, vowels and consonants are, of course, not objective, physical units but psychologically defined entities; the fact that geladas can accurately echo and replicate one another’s vocal alternations suggests that they, too, must be processing acoustic parameters of the signal stream in a digital, categorical way (cf. Hamad 1987).

Chimpanzee males often give ‘long calls’ together in chorus, striving to match the acoustic characteristics of each other’s vocalisations (Mitani and Brandt 1994). Such chorusing and duetting leads to some local standardisation of call variants, so that neighbouring communities may even display ‘dialectical’ differences (Mitani et a!. 1992). Each such distinctive chorus might almost amount to a ‘signature’ of local group identity (cf. Arcadi 1996; Mitani et al. 1992; Ujhelyi 1998). Where calls must carry over considerable distances, there is selection for salient, discrete form (Marler 1975: 16). These and comparable primate calls may be richly structured, the capacities underlying them constituting plausible precursors of the vocal competences drawn upon by humans in speech (Ujhelyi 1998).

Still more impressive are the vocalisations of those songbirds which can generate an extensive repertoire by recombining the same basic set of minimal acoustic units — avian equivalents of ‘phonemes’ and ‘syllables’. Each species has special rules for generating songs in this way. In the case of swamp sparrows, for example, each syllable is made up of two to six different notes, themselves meaningless, arranged in a distinctive cluster. The constituent notes are all drawn from a restricted species-wide repertoire of six note types with a set of rules for assembling them into a song (Marler and Pickett 1984).

Apart from speech, the only other animal signals displaying comparable structure are the learned songs of humpback whales (Payne, Tyack and Payne 1983) and other cetaceans. ‘Phonological syntax’, as Marler (1998: 10—11) terms such combinatorial creativity, is not found among nonhuman primates. Admittedly, chimpanzees construct their pant-hoots and gibbons their songs by assembling novel sequences from more basic recyclable units. But in their case each individual adopts for life just one combinatorial pattern, not a variable repertoire (Marler and Tenaza 1977).

Although categorically perceived, the minimal acoustic units of birdsong do not function in the manner of speech phonemes: that is, they play no role in selecting between overall meanings. Marler (1998: 11) describes ‘syntactical’ birdsong as ‘impoverished in referential content, but rich in idle emotional content’. The term ‘idle’ is well chosen here, testifying to the close relationship between such variability and the leisured creativity of animal ‘play’. Like play, syntactical creativity in animal signalling reflects inner realities, not functional demands or environmental stimuli. ‘The variety’ writes Marler (1998: 12),

is introduced, not to enrich meaning, but to create diversity for its own sake, to alleviate boredom in singer and listener, perhaps with individual differences serving to impress the listener with the singer’s virtuosity, but not to convey knowledge.

In this respect, such signalling differs not only from speech, but also from those other calls of birds, cetaceans or primates which do have meanings. Where alarms or other calls must convey reliable information, this can only be at the expense of ‘syntactical’ creativity or play.

‘Phonological’ Versus ‘Lexical’ Syntax

Acknowledging this dynamic, Marler (1998: 10—11) distinguishes between ‘phonological syntax’ on the one hand and ‘lexical syntax’ on the other. Phonological syntax we have just discussed. Lexical syntax in the animal world would be the rule-governed assembly and reassembly not just of phonetic representations but of semantic ones. Neither birds nor primates show evidence of syntax of this kind.

In a thought experiment, we might imagine vervet monkeys syntactically ‘playing’ with combinations of calls such as those warning of eagles, leopards or snakes (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). Why is it that in real life, this never happens? In this and other cases, neurophysiological limitations have been invoked to explain observed or postulated deficits in the signalling of primates other than modern humans (e.g. Bickerton 1990, 1996, 1998). Such explanations, however, overlook a deeper problem. Combining carefree, ‘playful’ signalling with life-and-death functional communication is logically paradoxical. Central to the very definition of play is that no immediate function is served, no compulsion applied. If animals could freely ‘play’ with signals conveying life-and-death meanings, then the result would be more than ‘creativity’ — it would be fatal unreliability and confusion.

Against this background, the puzzle of speech is that digital alternations among low-energy signals carry weighty social consequences. Substituting a ‘d’ for a ‘t’ in English, for example, will turn ‘tin’ into ‘din’ or ‘mat’ into ‘mad’. Speakers may make such phonemic substitutions to construct utterances which, if accepted as relevant, earn corresponding social status (Dessalles 1998). Just one consonant can decide between relevance and irrelevance, or life and death — between, say, ‘We will meet you tomorrow’ and ‘We will eat you tomorrow’. While this may be conceptualised as ‘extraordinary power’ (Studdert-Kennedy 1998: 202), it is important also to appreciate the social costs. How can changes in socially contestable meanings be left to the discretion of individuals who, to secure such changes, need only substitute one low-cost signal — one vowel or consonant — for another? How can listeners vest trust in a system as apparently arbitrary and open to abuse as this?

One fact is certain: in the animal world, sceptical recipients would insist on making any such substitutions costly, precluding a role for low-energy signals in deciding between socially contestable meanings (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). This alone rules out the idea that ‘lexical pressure’ — in advance of ritually enforced signal reliability (cf. Power, this volume) — can have driven the evolution of syllabic differentiation or the associated restructuring of the human vocal tract. In seeking to explain early vocal preadaptations for speech, then, we appear to have no alternative but to invoke ‘play’, on the model of birdsong and the song sequences of cetaceans.

Language and Animal Play

It is known that children derive substantial cognitive benefits from the sense of mastery and well-being associated with imaginative play (Piaget 1962; Vygotsky 1978; Bjorklund and Green 1992; see also Bruner, Jolly and Sylva 1976). Human infants from around 18 to 24 months start playing ‘pretend’, a critical development prefiguring more advanced levels of mind-reading competence (Leslie 1987; Dunn and Dale 1984). Representational play with realistic toys begins at about the age when children first acquire referential words (Bates 1976). Sequences of thematically related representational play roughly coincide with first use of syntactic combinations in expressive language (Bates et al. 1979; McCune-Nicolich and Bruskin 1982). From then on, young childrens’ most elaborate use of language occurs not in reality-bound, functional contexts but during make-believe play. ‘In play, as in fiction’, to quote one study (French et al. 1985: 24), ‘one has the freedom to violate the way things really are in favour of transitory transformations of reality’. As an instrument of ‘displaced reference’ (Hockett 1960), speech has exactly this function.

Maternal responsiveness is strongly correlated with complexity and preplanning in childhood representational play (Spencer and Meadow-Orlans 1996). No mother could play with her infant if she were intent on ‘winning’; she must know how to ‘lose’. In the animal world, too, if a normally dominant individual is to play with a subordinate, it must experiment with ‘losing’. Wherever inequalities exist, players must renounce physical advantages — or there will be no game. For play to flourish, safety and security must be sufficient to al-low participants freedom to explore the full range of their locomotor, cognitive and social capacities, trusting in the intentions of others. In all this, suggestive parallels with language are hard to avoid.

What makes an animal’s play gestures so different from the displays staged when under serious competitive pressure? Clearly, freedom from anxiety is decisive in making the difference. ‘Play’, as one specialist has noted (Shultz 1979: 10),

only seems to occur when the animal is essentially free of survival pressures — when it is not suffering from the heat, the cold, or the wet, when it is not being harrassed by predators, and when it is free of various physiological pressures such as hunger, thirst, drowsiness or sex.

For play to be possible, vulnerable individuals must feel able to afford the luxury of ‘losing’ without suffering the costs. Whereas male-male sexual contests or other fights focus repetitively on a narrow repertoire of locomotor routines, those engaged in ‘play fights’ may ring the changes on a varied repertoire. In play, losers and winners willingly exchange roles — a pattern reminiscent of turn-taking in conversational speech. Play participants gain cognitive benefits through identification with alternate roles in succession. Syntactical competence involves ‘playing’ with basic ‘who-does-what-to-whom’ categories such as Agent, Theme and Goal (Chomsky 1981). Social ‘pretend play’ draws on comparable capacities, and suggests a likely context for the evolution of such competence.

Where winning is not the intention, the play versions of actions need not be acted out in full — low-cost ‘tokens’ may suffice. In Kendon’s (1991) model of language origins, conceptual communication begins with the partial, tokenistic acting out of sequences whose significance was originally functional. Worden (1998) persuasively traces syntactical competence to its roots in social intelligence. Prior to the emergence of language, it would have been in the tokens of social play that such internal intelligence became externalised most fully.

The difference between a play representation and its serious functional prototype is categorical. A puppy which mistook a play bite for its real counterpart would respond inappropriately, just as would a human listener unable to ‘read behind’ the literal meanings of words (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Baron-Cohen 1995). A play bite resembles a real bite. But by being patently inserted in a nonfunctional context, it acquires a wholly different meaning (Bateson 1973: 150—166). When a preliminary signal is used to indicate ‘What follows is play!’, the effect is to systematically reverse the meanings of subsequent signals. For example, a dog may solicit play by lowering its head so as to appear nonthreatening; it wags its tail while crouched on its forelimbs, hindquarters raised (Bekoff 1977). In a pattern reminiscent of grammar, such a ‘play bow’ may introduce the rest of the sequence. The fact that a preliminary signal here reverses the ‘literal’ meanings of subsequent ‘attacks’, rather than simply augmenting or blending with them, suggests a plausible phylogenetic starting point for more complex forms of transformative, discrete/combinatorial signalling such as those involved in speech.

True imitation among apes has been most convincingly documented not in contexts of technical problem solving but during play (Visalberghi and Fragaszy 1990). Juveniles in the Arnhem Zoo, for example, have been observed amusing themselves by walking single file behind an adult group member, deliberately imitating their target’s limping or otherwise distinctive gait (de Waal 1996: 72). It is in such imaginative games — in these instances suggestive of subversive humour or even ‘name calling’ — that young chimpanzees approximate most closely to the conceptual richness and creativity of speech.

Language and Laughter

‘Mimesis’ is Donald’s (1991) term for putative early human emotional displays which, in being adapted to serve intentionally communicative functions, are brought increasingly under cognitive control. Children playing chase games provide familiar examples, as they fill the air with partly simulated screams. Inevitably, on hearing distant alarms, it may be difficult for others to distinguish real from fictional danger. Among primates, selection pressures have clearly acted to minimise such risks.

Noisy play among young primates is relatively rare, a fact which has been explained also by the danger of attracting predators (Biben 1998: 171). Where play is accompanied by vocalising, as when squirrel monkeys ‘play peep’ (Biben 1998: 171) or frolicking chimpanzees ‘laugh’ (Goodall 1986: 371), the sounds may assist in ‘framing’ other activities as ‘pretend’ versions of their serious prototypes. Instances of double-deception — deceptively signalling ‘play’ to trick and defeat an opponent — are not reported in the literature on primate ‘Machiavellian’ intelligence. Primate vocalisations, then, appear to differ from manual or whole-body gestures in one crucial respect: being reserved for reliable communication, they resist bifurcation into ‘pretend’ versions on the one hand and ‘real’ prototypes on the other. In the human case, this evolutionary constraint has evidently been overcome — a fact pointing to the impact upon social communication of distinctively human levels of safety, social security and corresponding freedom to play.

Homo sapiens possesses radically enhanced capacities for producing vocal signals which, like play bites, can be thought of as ‘displaced’ or ‘fictional’. Playful ‘screams’ are one example. Others are to be found in the games used by mothers to prompt their babies to laugh. One such trick is to hide and then suddenly reappear, to the exclamation ‘Boo!’ (Bruner and Sherwood 1976). There is a risk that instead of laughing, the baby may cry. This will almost certainly happen if the ‘Boo!’ is emitted by a stranger. But provided the context is reassuring, the baby should overcome its initial fear response, constructing an alternative referential frame which reverses the sound’s ‘literal’ meaning. Laughter gives expression to the baby’s sense of mastery and relief. Involved here is a minor revolution: the very signal most likely to cause alarm is, given sufficient trust, the surest way to elicit laughter in the child (Sroufe and Wunsch 1972).

The same principle applies to teasing, tickling and humour more generally. Young chimpanzees often engage in ‘tickling’ games, laughing all the while. The tickle gestures are aggressive actions, but only in pretend forms (Goodall 1986: 371). In humour of the human verbal kind, a train of thought in one frame of reference bumps up against an anomaly: an event or statement that makes no sense in the context of what has come before. The anomaly can be resolved by shifting to a different frame of reference, in which the event at last makes sense (Koestler 1964). Recall the baby who for a split second may have been puzzled by its mother’s ‘Boo!’ It laughs when it can place the signal in a different context, reversing its former meaning. More sophisticated jokes work in a similar way.

Pinker (1998: 552) points out that such frame shifting is not limited to the challenges of appreciating jokes. Involved here is none other than the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986) on which the very possibility of language depends. The semantic meanings of words, taken literally, are abstract and often irrelevant. In terms of their currently perceptible contexts, they may be inappropriate — like a mother’s ‘Boo!’ to her child. But as with babies displaying a sense of humour, human listeners do not leave matters there. On hearing such inappropriate abstractions and irrelevancies, they respond by adopting whatever frame of reference is required to make sense of them, amending or even reversing literal meanings as necessary. The aim is always to delve behind surface appearance in search of the signaller’s underlying intention, which may be quite different (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986).

According to Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989: 138), the sounds characteristic of human laughter may be traced back to the rhythmic mobbing calls of group-living primates:

The loud utterance of laughter is derived from an old pattern of behavior of mobbing, in which several group members threaten a common enemy. Thus it is a special case of aggressive behavior and this component retains its original significance. If we laugh aloud at someone, this is an aggressive act, bonding those who join in the laughter. Common laughter thus becomes a bonding signal between those who are common aggressors.

Chimpanzees ‘laugh’ when they ‘play fight’; here, the laughter indicates that the accompanying ‘aggressive’ behaviour is only ‘pretend’ (Goodall 1986: 371). We have then, as Pinker (1998: 546) points out, two candidates for precursors to human laughter: (1) a signal of collective mobbing or aggression and (2) a signal of ‘pretend’ aggression. These, however, are not mutually exclusive: pranks which are cruelly effective in puncturing outsiders’ pretensions may amuse insiders for precisely that reason.

Laughter is contagious, irrepressible and energetically demanding. Unlike dispassionate speech, it acts as a powerful bonding mechanism. As Elbl-Eibesfeldt (1989) points out, such bonding typically reflects an in-group/out-group dynamic: collusive laughter between allies is likely to be at the expense of targets outside the group. If we assume complex structures of dominance and status to have characterised early human social life, laughter — like the antics of de Waal’s chimp juveniles in the Arnhem Zoo — is likely to have signalled outbreaks of collective insubordination to those in authority. As Pinker (1998: 551) writes:

No government has the might to control an entire population, so when events happen quickly and people all lose confidence in a regime’s authority at the same time, they can overthrow it. This may be the dynamic that brought laughter — that involuntary, disruptive, and contagious signal — into the service of humor. When scattered titters swell into a chorus of hilarity like a nuclear chain reaction, people are acknowledging that they have all noticed the same infirmity in an exalted target. A lone insulter would have risked the reprisals of the target, but a mob of them, unambiguously in cahoots in recognizing the target’s foibles, is safe.

Laughter, then, may testify to the importance of humour as a levelling device among early human hunter-gatherers (cf. Lee 1988), helping to sustain distinctively human levels of in-group trust and mutuality on which speech in turn depends.

Can this understanding of laughter be extended to explain also the emergence of speech? Might phonology and syntax have arisen as the reverse side — the in-group ‘playful’ redeployment — of ‘ritual’ behaviour evolved originally for purposes of aggressive coalitionary display? When choral chanting and other such vocal display is used simply to demarcate in-group/out-group boundaries, form becomes everything, meaning nothing (Staal 1986: 57). Let me quote Staal (1986: 57) on how Vedic literature becomes ‘meaningless’ when adapted for purposes of pure ritual:

Entire passages that originally were pregnant with meaning are reduced to long ‘o’s’. This is precisely what distinguishes mantras from the original verse: to be made into a mantra, and thus fit for ritual consumption, a verse has to be subject to formal transformations, operations that apply to form and not to meaning…

Ritual traditions have obvious social significance in that they identify groups and distinguish them from each other. They give people, in that hackneyed contemporary phrase, ‘a sense of identity’. That identity, however, is often due to distinctions that rest upon meaningless phonetic variations. Thus the Jaiminīya and Kaǔthuma Rānāyanīya schools differ from each other by such characteristics as vowel length, or because the former uses ‘a’ when the latter uses ‘o’. Up to the present time, the Vedic schools themselves are distinguished from each other by such variations of sound that can more easily be explained in grammatical than in religious terms.

If this is accepted, then in the evolutionary past, group-on-group ritual display may plausibly have set up selection pressures for vocal imitation, syllabic differentiation and control — all in the complete absence of meaning. Along such lines, one might visualise ‘war dances’ to the accompaniment of assertive choral chanting, the whole display being mounted whenever a group felt threatened by local opposition. On each occasion when danger passed, however, we need not suppose complete cessation of the performance. Instead, on the model of play fighting, we might envisage elements of the formerly ‘meaningless’ display becoming redeployed internally for more complex conceptual and communicative ends. We might even follow Pinker (1998: 551) in linking successful outcomes with outbreaks of laughter. Incipiently language-like properties of both vocal and whole-body play — discussed earlier — would now characterise in-group communication, with recently evolved mimetic skills yielding a system more complex and syntactical than anything known before.

Play and the Emergence of Language

Many Darwinian attempts to explain the evolutionary emergence of language have been gradualist. By contrast, Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995: 279-309) view the origins of speech — together with other aspects of symbolic culture — as a ‘major evolutionary transition’ occurring late in human evolution. Building on this idea, I have modelled this development as one culminating in revolutionary social change (Knight 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999; Knight et al. 1995). This would locate Pinker’s (1998: 551) ideas about irreverent humour within a broader context of revolutionary social upheaval. Let me now, in this new context, integrate this body of theory with the previous discussion of play.

In the scenario I favour (cf. Knight 1998, 1999), coalition members assert group identity through locally distinctive patterns of chanting and other such ritual display, coming under pressure to imitate and synchronise with ‘friendly’ signals (cf. Studdert-Kennedy, this volume). As in any choral ensemble, attention to internal cues is valued as an indication of commitment to the coalition, in-group status being conferred accordingly (cf. Power, this volume). Given enhanced choral diversification and frequent breaks or changes, maintenance of overall synchrony and coherence relies heavily on information conveyed internally through brief, low-energy signals. Discernible at close range, syllables differentiated by subtle vowel modulations and consonantal contrasts serve this function. Selection pressures in this context drive evolutionary differentiation of the upper vocal tract. Whereas the ‘lexical pressure’ model presupposes speech from the outset, this model makes no such assumptions. Citing known biological precedents and respecting Darwinian constraints, it may better explain the emergence of a high-speed, low-cost, digital encoding medium available for subsequent exaptation to serve speech functions.

Conclusion: The Emergence of Syntactical Speech

In all mammalian species, it is the young who invest most energy in play. As with human speech, there is a genetically determined ‘critical period’ for engaging in social play to maximum cognitive advantage. An animal deprived of play opportunities during infancy may later show a deficit in normal social skills (Biben 1998). In the human case, childhood play is not phased out but rather preserved in the elaboration of adult symbolic competence and performance (Huizinga 1970; Bruner et al. 1976: 534—704). By contrast, the playfulness of young animals is for the most part inhibited with the onset of sexual maturity. Sexual competition can provoke lethal conflict. As animals mature, their play correspondingly becomes closely involved in the determination of social rank. With increasing frequency, play fights become real fights — whereupon the play stops. Adulthood for most primates is challenging and risky, affording relatively few opportunities for that trust and abandon which is the hallmark of genuine play.

The distinctively human counterdominance strategies intrinsic to ‘sham menstruation/sex strike’ (Knight, Power and Watts 1995; Power and Aiello 1997; Power and Watts 1996, 1997) drive the emergence of symbolic culture by extending ‘play’ into the domain of adult relationships. Siblings and more distant relatives who might otherwise have been pitched into direct sexual rivalry are bonded in playful coalitionary opposition to the out-group. By retaining close bonds with kin-related females (cf. Power 1998, 1999, this volume), each coalition is enabled to extract increasing levels of mating effort from males. The outcome is ‘bride service’, an arrangement characteristic of hunter-gatherers, in which in-marrying males bring regular meat or other provisioning under supervision from their in-laws (Knight 1991, 1999). While this amounts to ‘economic exploitation’, Darwinian considerations clarify why minimal resistance is to be expected. In-marrying males are gaining access to the group’s fertile females; moreover, they are provisioning their own probable offspring. Combative coalitions formed to secure such outcomes, meeting little organised resistance, should be highly stable. They are familiar ethnographically as unilineal lineages and clans.

What is the significance of all this for language evolution? The key point is that ‘lexical syntax’ (Marler 1998) presupposes digital as opposed to analog distinctions between meanings. Like distinctions between the face values of banknotes, such contrasts depend entirely on collective agreement. Take the case of kinship terms — an obvious initial focus for any human language. In hunter-gatherer kinship terminologies, ‘sister’ is defined in opposition to the contrastive term ‘wife’. Primates could not sustain belief in such contrastive meanings, even if they had the cognitive competence. This is because their kin coalitions are neither categorically bounded nor stable. A close female relative from one standpoint will therefore be a less close relative — potentially a mate — from another. Instead of being categorically — in the eyes of a stable collectivity — ‘sister’ or ‘wife’, each female will be more or less either according to individual standpoint. Primate politics determine that other social meanings will be similarly graded and contested.

Within human systems of ‘fictive’ kinship, a woman is ‘our sister’ (or a man ‘our brother’) because the collectivity asserts it to be so. Children engaged in games of ‘let’s pretend’ may likewise assert, ‘this rag is mummy’ or ‘that stick is a horse’ (Leslie 1987). In stratified societies, specified persons on a similar basis may count as ‘the government’ while certain small pieces of paper count as ‘money’. Not necessarily dependent upon verbal language, such ‘institu-tional facts’ are expressions of collective intentionality (Searle 1998). To uphold them is a social, moral and — in a most fundamental sense — religious challenge (Durkheim 1965). To confuse ‘sister’ with ‘wife’, after all, would be more than mere semantic or cognitive error — it would be a violation (Levi-Strauss 1969). Likewise if you visited my home and confused our family tablecloth with the doormat. Transgression of such categorical boundaries amounts to sacrilege. Words would lose all meaning if such boundaries could not be enforced.

The main institutional fact — the condition of all others — is that the collectivity exists. To represent this fact is to assert group self-identity, defined in opposition to the out-group. Such boundary maintenance requires serious effort, presupposing costly signals, not mere tokenistic substitutes. I have argued elsewhere (Knight 1999) that as group-living ancestral humans came under corresponding pressure to perform their war dances or sing their mantras, they shared in representing ‘the sacred’ as an emblem of group-level solidarity and identity (cf. Durtheim 1965). In this chapter I have suggested that during intervening periods of relaxation, however, as the performers periodically dispersed, these same representational techniques became available for redeployment in a quite different — essentially playful — atmosphere. Intentions were now once again those of distinct individuals, partitioning their shared representational resources accordingly. Processes of trust-based abbreviation and conventionalisation in this context generated a growing repertoire of low-cost tokens which, while expressive of merely personal intentions, nonetheless retained the social authority and communicable status of the whole. ‘Words’ were in this way ‘authorised’ — endowed by the ritual collective with performative force (cf. Austin 1978; Bourdieu 1991).

Finally, we may return to the ‘insuperable’ problem posed by MacNeilage (1998). When, how and why did the modality switch to vocal speech occur?

MacNeilage’s basic argument, we may recall, is that if the vocal-auditory modality was adaptive during the later stages of human speech evolution, it must therefore have been equally adaptive from the outset. This argument would have force if it could be confirmed that the social contexts of language use remained invariant throughout the course of human evolution. But if changing social strategies are built into our models, there is no reason to suppose that a modality which is adaptive during one period must remain equally adaptive later. Where social contexts are ‘Machiavellian’, as is the case among primates (Byrne and Whiten 1988), constraints operate to obstruct the emergence of low-cost, conventional — in other words fakeable — signalling (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). We have seen that in the primate case, the need to retain intrinsic signal credibility precludes playful cognitive expressivity in the vocal-auditory channel. Until this problem was solved, conceptual signalling had therefore to rely on a different modality. We may suppose that hominid use of the hands and body — whose manipulability had originally evolved in the service of noncommunicative functions — came increasingly to serve this novel purpose. Unfettered cognitive manipulability, however, was inconsistent with signal credibility (cf. Knight 1998). Mimesis (Donald 1991) may in this light have emerged in the human lineage as a compromise between these opposing pulls: hard-to-fake signals became manipulable, but only within limits. Costly, hard-to-fake and for that reason intrinsically convincing ‘song and dance’ remained central to communication wherever resistance to deception remained high.

As exogamous kin-coalitions became repeatedly successful and correspondingly stable, however (Knight 1991), the outcome was a radical intensification of in-group trust. Not only did this allow costs to be cut through adoption of conventional shorthands. A corollary was the establishment, through collective intentionality, of semantic meanings in the form of digitally contrastive collective representations. In arriving at shorthands for these, we would expect ‘conspiratorial whisperers’ (cf. Krebs and Dawkins 1978) to resort to the cheapest, most efficient available encoding medium. Considerations of speed and efficiency in this new context drove progressive exaptation of the phonological system, yielding syntax in the Chomskyan sense — an autonomous level of structure serving as a ‘switchboard’ (Newmeyer 1991) between the formerly disparate systems of vocal transmission and conceptual representation.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Catherine Arthur and Michael Studdert-Kennedy for their critical comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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Lie and alternative, inherent in language pose problems to any society whose structure is founded on language, which is to say all human societies. I have therefore argued that if there are to be words at all it is necessary to establish The Word, and that The Word is established by the invariance of liturgy

Rappaport 1979: 210—11

Language can be studied independently, or as an aspect of human sociality. Theoretical linguistics could not exist as a discipline were it not for the relative autonomy of language as a system. Ultimately, however, this system functions within a wider domain of signals which include cosmetics, dress, art, ritual and much else whose study takes us beyond linguistics.

A Darwinian theory of the origins of language must therefore address two issues. Firstly, it must explain the relative autonomy of language. Secondly, it must elucidate the evolutionary relationship between speech and a wider biological, social and symbolic domain of signals and displays.

Primates negotiate socially through displays of dominance, submission, appeasement, threat, sexual arousal and so forth. Each vocal signal forms part of a more complex visual-auditory display which includes posture and facial expression. A chimpanzee may express fear, for example, by a ‘pant-scream’ accompanied by a ‘grin’. Presentation of the rump accompanied by a ‘pant-grunt’ signals ‘respect’. Very different is the intimidatory ‘roaring pant-hoot’ of an aroused chimpanzee male. Consisting of a series of low-pitched calls, this is always accompanied by a charging display (Goodall 1986: 114—45, 360).

The point about calls of this kind is that they have not been decoupled as low-cost conventional tokens from the wider system of energetically demanding display. In the human case, such decoupling has evidently occurred, giving rise to a tokenistic, digitally organized system — speech — operating on a level quite independent of bodily display (Burling 1993).

At some point in the evolutionary past, the ancestors of modern humans must have had a repertoire of primate-style gestures and displays. Signals of this kind live on as the human species’ own gesture-call system — a ‘universal language’ of smiles, frowns and other ‘hard to fake’ emotional expressions including laughter, crying and so forth (Burling 1993; Ekman 1982). However, while important on the level of personal relationships, in the human case this system no longer carries the main burden of expressing and constituting sociopolitical structure at the global level. Rather, in the case of human hunter-gatherers and other pre-state societies, this function of exciting, mobilizing and giving expression to collective structural relationships has been taken over by ritual. In all traditional cultures, humans invest enormous amounts of energy in the ritual domain. Unlike speech, ritual signals are not confined to a single channel; neither are they necessarily effective in communicating complex trains of thought. Like animal gesture/calls, human ritual displays are characteristically loud, multimedia, emotionally infectious and heavily redundant (Rappaport 1979: 173—246).

Despite evidence of evolutionary continuity human ritual signals differ from their animal counterparts in two ways. Firstly, structure-generating ritual performances are staged not by individuals acting independently but by whole coalitions, whose members dance, drum, sing or otherwise rhythmically coordinate in asserting group identity and a boundary against outsiders (see, for example, Cohen 1985; Harrison 1993). In the human case, moreover, the cognitive outcome is an internal domain of communal pretend-play or ‘counter-reality’. Human ritual performance, when successful, generates a whole new cognitive domain — a virtual world discernible on another representational level from the currently perceptible or ‘real’ one (Durkheim 1912; Gellner 1992: 36—7; Turner 1967).

In speech, pressure for communicative speed and efficiency selects heavily against costly display in favour of tokenistic signalling. In ritual performance, reverse pressures apply, driving signallers to prolong, to repeat and to incur heavy costs. Ritual signals cannot be replaced by tokens without loss of effect. In trance-inducing rhythmic drumming, for example, nothing short of the direct physical and emotional impact of hands repeatedly hitting drumskins will do. Percussionists are not supposed to drum tokenistically. Or take the example of wailing or other public expressions of grief at a funeral. It is the wrenching, costly body-signals which matter, especially when these appear irrepressible. Where mourners remain dispassionate, resorting simply to tokens, there may be little point in staging the ritual at all. In ritual, to lose the display, replacing it by a conventional token, is simply to lose the signal.

Intrinsic credibility or ‘indexicality’ (Pierce 1940) is, then, the hallmark of ritual signals. Paradoxically, however, such signals are deployed within ritual precisely to displace the individual’s reality-based cognition, substituting a collectively defined ‘other-world’ (cf. Chase, this volume). A funeral occurs when a loved one has died. It is precisely that disturbing social absence which provokes counter-measures, the deceased’s continued ‘presence’ being constructed by emotionally convincing display. If the illusory realm generated by ritual fails to eclipse ‘this world’, then some thing is wrong. This is why we feel irritated by someone munching food or otherwise distracting attention during a visit to the theatre. Like a stage-show or television soap-opera, ritual must successfully interfere with the processes of ordinary perception/cognition (Bloch 1985), enabling par ticipants to cut adrift from their own personal reality into an alternative, communal one. At the theatre, reality fades as the auditorium lights are dimmed. A hush descends and the curtain slowly rises, revealing a well-lit stage. We are wafted into another world.

Ancient Greek theatre evolved from ritual. Pre-state societies may not have theatre in the modern sense, but everywhere, performances are staged in giving tangible form to myth (Fontenrose 1959; Warner 1959). Cross culturally, ritual time tends to begin around dusk, when shadows lurk and the hold of reality fails. Trance-inducing dance, fasting and/or hallucinogens may enhance the effect. The whole point of all this is to make people see ‘beyond’ perceptible reality into the other-worldly domain — that of morally authoritative intangibles (cf. Turner 1967: 93—111). The gods and spirits, normally invisible, must be experienced at least periodically as more real than reality itself.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPEECH AND RITUAL

Primate gesture/calls, then, are holistic, both audible and visible signals being embedded in a unitary system of display. By contrast, in the human case, ‘ritual’ constitutes a gestural system differentiated from vocal speech, the two having evolved along divergent trajectories (see Table 12.1).

To these contrasts we can add another, arrived at by inference on the basis of Darwinian signal-evolution theory (Dawkins and Krebs 1984; Zahavi 1987, 1993; see discussion in Knight et al. 1995). According to this body of theory, where we find high-cost, repetitive, multimedia displays, we may infer a function in terms of social manipulation, conflict and exploitation. Resistance on the part of receivers sets up selection pressures acting on signal design. Signallers who encounter ‘sales resistance’, like modern commercial advertisers, are driven to respond by prolonging and repeating signals, increasing amplitude and resorting to costly multi media displays. Peacocks provide examples of this, as do caribou bulls bellowing at one another during the rutting season. Zahavi (1987) has shown how the discernible costs of such displays enhance their credibility by tapping and hence testing the very reservoirs of quality that signallers are attempting to advertise. High-cost signalling of this kind may be regarded as representing a victory on the part of sceptical receivers spurring signallers to ever greater competitive effort.

By contrast, where we find low-cost, quiet and efficient signals, a co-operative audience can be inferred. If signallers can afford to cut their emission costs, it can only be because listeners are investing corresponding effort in receiving, decoding and acting on signals. This in turn means that signallers and receivers must have shared interests. For such ‘conspiratorial whispering’ (Dawkins and Krebs 1984) to evolve, signallers must be imparting useful information to receivers. Logically, the ultimate cost-cutting strategy would be to resort to purely tokenistic, wholly conventional signals which can be processed categorically at speed — relieving listeners of the need to evaluate gradations in physical performance. According to Zahavi (1993), however, animal ‘conspiracies’ are never sufficiently cooperative. Internal conflict and scepticism precludes ultimate reliance on tokenistic ‘paper money’. Nowhere in the living world do we find purely conventional signalling — with the one puzzling exception of human speech.

This discussion allows us to establish one more contrast — this time functional — between speech and ritual. On the basis of Darwinian signal evolution theory, it can be inferred that speech emerged in a cooperative context while ritual did not. For speech to have evolved, ‘conspiratorial whispering’ in the human case must have been anomalously trusting. By contrast, ritual — with its costly, inefficient features of redundancy and display — can only have emerged out of conflict, manipulation and exploitation.

FORM AND FUNCTION OF RITUAL SIGNALS

Speech is utterly different from ritual. Yet there remains a connection. Opposition is itself a relationship, and it is clear that speech could have no force or function were it not for its paradoxical connection with ritual.

The inscription on a banknote — ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand’ — inspires trust only thanks to a system of state printing controls, counterfeit detection and law enforcement including court proceedings and punishment for fraudulent abuse. We are able to use banknotes, then, thanks only to a system of communal action quite external to the paper used to print them. Hunter-gatherer societies are stateless. They lack courts, prisons, money or specialist law-enforcement agencies (Engels 1972 [1884]) However, they do perform rituals. My argument is that costly ritual is the pre-state system of communal action which backs up the otherwise valueless tokens central to speech.

Words resemble banknotes in that they are intrinsically worthless, requiring an external system of controls if they are to be usable at all (Knight 1998). Like commercial transactions, ‘speech acts’, as Austin (1978) has shown, are social transactions dependent on communal validation for their force. The implicit or explicit contracts by which speakers bind themselves are morally authoritative intangibles. But how is it that such intangibles are representable? ‘What, for example, is a promise? Can such a thing be seen, heard, tasted, kicked or by any means perceived? Could a group of chimpanzees trade in entities of this kind?

To deal in social contracts is to agree to enter a virtual world, not unlike that of a board game such as Monopoly. Just as Monopoly money cannot be used without a display of commitment on the part of players, so ‘promising’ presupposes a certain background of commitments and formal expectations. Suppose I preface my propositional utterance with an oath — ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. For this to count, I must signal by my clothes, my evident situation or in other ways that I am someone of appropriate moral status — the right person to utter such words in this place and at this time. Only then will my oath be accepted as valid ( Austin 1978). In short, a promise exists only in the context of commitment to a kind of game. Like an oath, its successful enactment is best thought of as a hard-to-fake, communally verifiable display of commitment or obligation. Only a speaker who can deliver on the hard-to-fake components of his signal can deploy the cheap tokens — ‘words’ — through which collusion in the verbal transaction is secured (cf. Austin 1978; Bourdieu 1992).

A human cultural system may be immeasurably more complex than any game of pretend-play. But just as a game is constructed out of pretend-play tokens and rules, so human symbolic culture in general is composed en-tirely of entities constructed via a kind of play.

It is such play which allows the Jalé of Papua New Guinea to restrict themselves to a lexicon featuring just two basic colour terms — roughly ‘dark’ and ‘light’. In other cultures, playing by other rules which demand a further term, ‘red’ is predictably the next one to emerge (Berlin and Kay 1969). It need hardly be stressed that such minimal discriminations operate on a level quite independent of personal colour perception: all humans, in all cultures, discriminate perceptually between an immense variety of different colours. To take another well-known example, among the Nuer, named categories of time are those defined by shared ritual experiences specific to the culture, such as ‘the time of milking the cattle’, ‘when the calves come home’ and so forth (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 100-8). Here again, it is the ritual structure which defines the categories — this time temporal — which are available to be named.

Within a ceremonial house among the Kabyle in North Africa, the dry, light area of floor-space counts as ‘the place of honour’ while the darker, moister area is ‘the place of the tomb’ (Bourdieu 1990). No one in the dwelling who remained unaware of this distinction could speak or act within the house in an appropriate way. An Australian Aboriginal landscape is in a comparable way ‘totemic’ — structured by morally authoritative intangibles. Here, the red stains in a rock mark a mythical being’s bloody death; there, a misshapen boulder is all that remains of a Dreamtime ancestor; in this pool dwells the fearsome ‘Rainbow Snake’ (Barnard, this volume; Mountford 1978; Strehlow 1947).

Such examples show how every linguistic term for a discriminable ‘thing’ in symbolic culture is tokenistic of some game-defined entity, in principle no different from the pretend-play components of a Monopoly game. Words do not map to external, perceptible realities — only to things established as ‘real’ through the playing out of the local game. This is why I would argue, contrary to Chase (this volume), that symbolic reference and symbolic culture are logically inseparable and so must have evolved together.

On the one hand, then, there is the perceptual level of representation. Life is made up of realities such as a chimpanzee might spontaneously perceive — realities such as the hardness or taste of a Monopoly board, or the clothing or body-odour of one of the players. But on the other hand, participants in game-like domains must negotiate their way through a virtual world — a world of contractual intangibles which ‘exist’ only because it is agreed to act collectively ‘as if’ they did. Ritual is this collective acting out. It is not an optional add-on with respect to the rest of symbolic culture. It is the actual playing of the game — life conducted ‘as if’ the gods or other morally authoritative intangibles were real (cf. Chase, this volume).

In entering into the spirit of a game, each player must override physical reality, which now becomes external to the game’s own illusory domain. Suppose, for example, one player of Monopoly is larger or more muscular than another. This is irrelevant: it does not permit the stronger partner to take advantage. To play properly, the players must set aside the dispositions applicable in ordinary life in favour of the quite different rules internal to the game. Each player must undergo a kind of conversion experience, analogous to an initiation rite, after which nothing remains what it seemed. Portions of worthless cardboard now count as ‘streets’, small bits of wood are ‘houses’, bits of paper are ‘banknotes’. Such eclipsing of reality transports participants into a shared domain of acted-out fantasy which constitutes the game.

In pre-state societies, ‘rites of passage’ (Van Gennep 1960) are designed to bring about in each individual precisely that ‘conversion experience’ necessary for the local game to appear playable. Only once the gods, spirits and comparable intangibles seem experientially real are individuals in a position to function within the symbolic domain. There are good reasons why initiation rites tend to be painful, manipulative, coercive and generally ‘unfair’. The reason is the same as that which makes all ritual unfair. Ritual, like warfare, cannot afford to assume that there are any rules.

It may seem paradoxical to reflect that while game-like behaviour must by definition be ‘fair’, ritual signals cannot be. The explanation is that if behaviour is to be judged as fair, a set of rules for making such evaluations must already exist. But what if no one wants to play by the rules? Imagine a festive family gathering spurning Monopoly in favour of socializing, eating or watching television. To get them to play, it will clearly be useless to offer Monopoly banknotes as bribes. All other tokenistic appeals will equally fail. The only solution is to step outside such pretend-play, intervening in reality itself Loudly halt the conversation, take the food off the table, switch off the television. The convenor must ‘cheat’ in order to get people to play, switching off their involvement in perceptible reality, amplifying the attractions of pretend-play, overstepping all rules in securing compliance with rule.

This is the task of ritual. Like civil war, its function is to assert physical mastery by a particular coalition dictating the terrain on which future games are to be played. It is therefore no surprise to find that ritual signals differ from words in presupposing no prior adherence or commitment. Ritual, like violence, impacts on its human victims directly, seeking out vulnerable spots in the targeted biological and psychological material. Coercive intimidation, hallucination, dance, rhythm, seduction and emotional manipulation all have their place. In much of Aboriginal Australia, boys were initiated into rule-governed adulthood by having their genitals attacked in practices ranging from circumcision to the excruciating ordeal of subincision (Montagu 1974). If part of the definition of ‘fairness’ is two-way negotiation on the basis of agreed rule, then this was clearly unfair. But all ritual signals have to work like this. To secure commitment to the world of ‘rules’ and other such communal make-believe, the habits and dispositions of ordinary life must first be coercively defeated (Bloch 1985). We can put this another way by saying that no one would be ‘taken in’ by ritual signals with their improbable ‘other-worldly’ messages if such signals did not hit below the belt, using what by rational or logical standards would seem unfair methods of persuasion.

EVOLUTION OF COLLECTIVE DECEPTION: THE ‘WARFARE’ MODEL

Young primates may engage in play — such as play-fighting — which pre pares them for adult life (Bruner et al. 1976). But they do not engage in communal pretend-play — play in which all agree to act out an imaginary scenario. Even if they were capable of this, it seems doubtful whether they would have a motive. Why invest energy in colluding with someone else’s illusory world when the real one is so much more engaging?

Of course, primates do not engage only with reality. Primate ‘tactical deception’ has been closely studied, in part because it arguably prefigures human ‘symbolic’ usage. In the primate case, however, reality-defying signalling is not cooperative. It is always ‘Machiavellian’, individualistic and competitive. Suppose a baboon falsely signals by its posture that it has seen a threatening leopard, seeking by this deceptive signal to gain a selfish advantage (cf. Byrne and Whiten 1985). Can we speak of the fictional leopard as ‘symbolic’? Clearly not. The signaller’s selfishness means that conspecifics will have no reason to collude with the fiction. The imaginary ‘leopard’ will therefore not be taken up by others and sustained. Once the fiction is exposed, all interest in it will disappear. On this basis, ‘memic’ evolution of fictions (Dawkins 1976) will simply never get off the ground.

Collectively sustained deception, by contrast, is the essence of the game-playing known as ‘symbolic culture’. How close do chimpanzees get to this in the wild? When a group of common chimps raids into a neighbouring territory, the leaders may insist on silence from the whole band, enforcing this through reprimands (Goodall 1986: 490-1). Although the group is now physically present in the invaded neighbourhood, we might say that its members are ‘pretending’ not to be. However, this still falls short of symbolism. Silence provides no fictional signal which can be collectively elaborated or sustained. To generate symbolism, communal pretend-play would have to go a step further — from cooperative non-signalling to active reality-defying display.

Coalitions strong enough to constrain their members’ behaviour do not form in a vacuum. They need an external threat capable of generating internal cohesion on the necessary scale. It has been suggested that evolving Homo recurrently engaged in group-on-group contests equalling or exceeding ingroup/outgroup conflict between neighbouring bands of common chimpanzees; ingroup ‘moral’ codes may have emerged in such contexts (Alexander 1989). This theory would lead us to suppose that something akin to ‘war’ drove the evolutionary emergence of human morality and symbolic culture.

It must be conceded that ‘primitive warfare’ provides a plausible context for the emergence of collective deception. Success in warfare depends not merely on direct physical violence but also on psychological factors such as surprise, intimidatory display, rumour and the advance dissemination of fear. Turning to the evolution of Homo, it is not difficult to picture early prefigurations of such group-on-group psychological tactics, and to understand how they may have led some way down the road towards symbolism.

Aggressive displays by coalitions of pre-modern humans would have had internal as well as external functions, coming under correspondingly contrasting selection pressures. Within an aggressive coalition, while pre paring to fight, individuals can afford to communicate their intentions internally by means of cryptic ‘nods’ and ‘winks’. In other words, short-hand, abbreviated versions of the behavioural routines involved in coalitionary defence or war preparations may suffice in such contexts. However, given the risks of reliance on cheap signals (Zahavi 1987, 1993), even such internal tokenism will remain ultimately dependent on the shared obligation to resort at least periodically to genuine fighting. Only each individual’s sustained display of genuine commitment to fight the enemy — clearly, a costly signal — will generate the internal trust necessary for low-cost ingroup tokens to work.

Here, then, we have a possible solution to our basic question: How did ‘speech’ become decoupled so decisively from ‘ritual’? The ‘primitive war-fare’ model (Alexander 1989) suggests an answer: this decoupling was a consequence of group-on-group conflict, which — to the extent that firm ingroup/outgroup boundaries became established — drove ingroup signalling down one evolutionary trajectory and external signalling along a radically divergent one, the two systems nonetheless remaining mutually interdependent.

Aggressive displays are iconic and indexical (Peirce 1940): just as smoke means fire, so a body of men performing a war dance means war. When I see and hear the signs of an approaching army, I am persuaded to flee neither by symbolic metaphor, nor by assent to any code, but directly in proportion as the drums, pennants and weaponry seem to demonstrate the threat posed by that force. The signals, then, work only by claiming a verifiable fit with the currently perceptible world. Suppose I deduce that the displays are mere bluff, exaggerated out of all proportion to the violence which can really be mounted. Then the signals have failed in their purpose.

This is a weakness in the theory that symbolism arose out of group on-group conflict or ‘warfare’. It would seem that the model cannot get beyond indexicality — signals which remain ultimately reality-bound. ‘What, then, of the ‘counter-reality’ which constitutes human cultural symbolism? In this, signals can be seen, perceptually, to bear no relationship to reality Yet far from nullifying the message, recognition of such patent pretend-play prompts a search for meaning ‘on another level’. In observing the pretend-play, we ask: What is the signaller intending us to understand (cf. Grice 1969)?

In this context, the kinds of conflict intrinsic to ‘warfare’ may be simply too unremitting to generate symbolic culture. No army can afford to see through the enemy’s bluff, discern the signalling intention — and then collude with that intention. Yet cooperation of this kind is precisely what symbolic communication entails. Every signal, viewed in terms of its own intrinsic properties, is wholly unconvincing. This being so, we seek to discern what the signaller is attempting to convey (Grice 1969). The difference between ritual display and the use of symbolic tokens is that the former does not assume prior collusion — ritual faces the task of securing cooperation from the target, whether by fair means or foul. Cooperation in symbolic performance, whether ritual or verbal, by contrast does assume prior collusion. Even should the audience ‘see’ on a perceptual level that everything is pure pretence, they must still suspend disbelief. It is difficult to see how ‘warfare’ could bring this about.

In addition to this difficulty, the ‘warfare’ model fails to capture the essence of hunter-gatherer ritual as a means of demarcating ingroup/outgroup boundaries. In warfare, each army or aggressive coalition wins on some occasions, loses on others. By contrast, human hunter-gatherers invest enormous amounts of energy in elaborate ritual performances which are not expected to fail. Investment in performances such as initiation rites in normal times far outweighs investment in violence aimed at territorial neighbours. In fact, Australian Aboriginal ritual structures appear designed precisely to transcend simple ingroup/outgroup territorial conflict, setting up ‘chains of connection’ — structures of ritually defined interdependence — stretching across the landscape. In north-east Arnhem Land , Australia , a major initiation ceremony such as the Djungguan gathered together clans normally dispersed over a wide area, often speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects (Warner 1957). A simple ‘territorial warfare’ model would not predict any of this.

THE EVOLUTION OF INITIATION RITES

Ritual is not quite the same thing as war, although it may be valid to conceptualize it as ‘war by other means’. A crucial difference is that warfare relies overwhelmingly on physical violence. Ritual by no means excludes violence, but performers reduce the costs of actual fighting by resorting in the first instance to display. Ritual display, moreover, is not necessarily or exclusively aggressive or intimidatory — it may equally be seductive (cf. Miller, Power this volume). Hence while military strategies can be discussed without reference to sexual strategies, this is not possible in the case of ritual action. When dancers prepare for a collective ritual display, all the signalling potentialities of the human body are in principle there to be drawn upon. Hunter-gatherer ritual performances in fact establish ingroup/outgroup boundaries recurrently coinciding with those between exogamous kin-groups. The aim is less to kill than to impress the enemy and in consequence to secure the best possible deal in marital exchanges with the outgroup — using not only threats but gifts and all available techniques of manipulation, exploitation and seduction (Knight 1991).

For Darwinians, a deeply rooted and pervasive form of intraspecific ‘warfare’ is the inevitability of conflict between the sexes (Dawkins 1976; Trivers 1972; Hill and Kaplan 1988). A model of human ritual as originating in ‘warfare’ pitting all females against all males would clearly be unrealistic. However, females are related to males not only as mates/ spouses. They are also mothers/sisters/kin. If the concept of sexual conflict is integrated with that of coalitionary kin-bonding, we may construct a model of sexual ‘warfare’ which has promising potential to account for the emergence of symbolic culture in forms consistent with data from the hunter-gatherer ethnographic record.

Suppose males in alliance with sisters and other kin conduct ‘warfare’ against outgroup males, seeking to exploit their muscle-power by offering marital access only in return for provisioning. This is not an unreasonable idea: hunter-gatherer ‘brideservice’ embodies precisely this principle. A young man seeking a bride first has to prove himself as a hunter. When he has made a kill, he may stand a chance of sexual acceptance. He takes the meat to the kin of his chosen bride. They may inspect the meat and, if satisfied, allow the young man to stay a night. If he wants future sex, he will have to bring more meat. Should he prove unlucky, lazy or incompetent, he may be told to stay away. To avoid unwanted liaisons, many hunter-gatherers remain distrustful of sons-in-law for years, preventing them from asserting permanent marital rights in their brides. Even after a child has been born, the young man will usually be expected to make substantial regular contributions of meat to both the bride and her kin (Collier and Rosaldo 1981; see discussion in Knight 1991: 122-53).

Success in this strategy presupposes women’s ability to mobilize male kin where necessary against uncooperative mates or spouses. ‘Where this condition is met, the relationship between wife’s kin and in-marrying bridegroom may be emphatically hierarchical and one-sided. Among many hunter-gatherers, a male will not even be considered as a potential son-in-law before he has undergone initiation, the function of which is to teach him what ritual obligation means. There must be no answering back. Victory to the ‘wife-givers’ is predetermined long in advance (Knight 1991: 122-53). If this is ‘war’, then, it is peculiar in that the same side invariably wins. This may seem less puzzling, however, when we remember that for the ‘defeated’ side, there is much consolation. The ‘exploited’ outgroup males are in fact being allowed access to the group’s fertile females. The reproductive fitness of these males will be enhanced if they obtain hunted meat not in order to eat it themselves but as a form of currency which can be traded for sexual access, with the benefits accruing to their offspring (cf. Hill and Kaplan 1988). On Darwinian grounds, we would not expect these males to resist such ‘exploitative’ arrangements beyond a certain point.

In all this, loud ritual signals are securing coalitionary dominance in order to maintain a system of economic ‘exploitation’. The immediate beneficiaries are coalitionary alliances of mothers and their offspring, who would otherwise be unable to secure comparable meat-supplies (cf. Key and Aiello, this volume). Note, however, that the strategy is one in which males as mates are being exploited not by females acting alone but by mixed-sex kin-based coalitions. Ingroup males, no less than females, are engaging in the necessary economic ‘exploitation’ of outgroup males who in turn — as brothers in relation to their own kinswomen — help sisters/mothers ‘exploit’ their in-marrying spouses and sons-in-law.

In evolutionary perspective, the emergence of such coalitionary strategies may be seen as female-driven (Power and Aiello 1997). Evolving human females, heavily burdened with increasingly encephalized, slow-developing offspring, would have been under pressure to secure investment from wherever this could be obtained. Support in rearing offspring could potentially be enlisted from (a) local kin-related females, (b) kin related males and (c) male sexual partners. I have argued (Knight 1991; Knight et al. 1995) that the optimal strategy was to draw on support from all three, securing coalitionary backing from (a) and (b) in the task of economically exploiting (c). Females enhanced their fitness, if this model is accepted, by combining sexual allure with coalitionary organizing skills aimed at maximizing ‘brideservice’ exploitation of spouses.

To make this model testable, we may explore its internal logic, drawing out theoretical predictions which can then be checked against the findings of hunter-gatherer ethnographers, archaeologists, rock-art specialists and others with relevant test-data.

A major problem would have been posed by menstrual bleeding. When she menstruates, a female signals her imminent fertility. For reasons quite independent of ‘culture’, this amounts to a ‘danger’ signal to all other females in the vicinity (Power, this volume). The problem for pregnant and lactating mothers is that they cannot display such blood. The all-too-evident distinction set up between the menstruant and other local females tells philanderer males whom to bond with and whom to temporarily abandon. Left to themselves, males under such circumstances may compete for access only to cycling (hence fertilizable) females. Success may then go to those dominant males best at abandoning any pregnant or breast-feeding partner in favour of a newly menstruating female — best at driving off the competition, bonding with the menstruant and mate-guarding her until impregnation has been achieved. Subdominant males may then find themselves threatened with loss of their sexual partners at the very moment when these are imminently fertile. As males compete for access to visibly menstruating females, non-cycling females will lose out, abandoned by their distracted mates.

In real life, however, every male strategy for asserting monopoly control over female reproductive value is likely to be met by a female counter-strategy (Gowaty 1997). Again quite independently of ‘culture’, a mother should simply not allow her menstruating daughter to be coopted and privatized under male sexual dominance. Defending against this possibility, she should bond tightly with the especially valuable female at precisely such a time. Sisters, brothers and other close relatives should equally feel threatened, bond with her and resist on her behalf.

As Power (this volume) has pointed out, the obvious additional counter-strategy for females threatened temporarily by their inability to menstruate is to cheat. Thanks to the intrinsic nature of the signal, which offers shareable blood, cheating is a possibility What can prevent pregnant and breast-feeding mothers from painting up anyway with surrogate ‘menstrual’ blood? In this context, any red pigment — a daughter’s menstrual blood, blood from an animal, red berry juice, red ochre — may serve the purpose. Dominant males may in theory still draw a dividing line between genuinely and artificially menstruating females. But this can be countered if local females physically bond with any menstruant, preventing active discrimination between them.

The outcome will be a situation in which, whenever a woman menstruates, the signal sparks a contest. On the one hand, this is a contest for dominance between sexually motivated males. But on the other hand, contesting this whole dynamic are the menstruant’s kin, who have no interest in allowing the outcome to be decided by naked sexual conflict between outgroup males. Their interest lies in retaining control over the menstruant, preventing any outgroup male from successfully privatizing her. That way, they can ensure that additional mating effort expended by outgroup males accrues to themselves as a coalition. If all equally ‘paint up’, constructing the menstruant as inseparable from themselves, then every outgroup male can be fed the illusion that his current partner is imminently fertilizable. In this way, success in turning the menstrual signal from a threat into a communal asset can in principle be achieved. The whole strategy may be conceptualized as a form of female ‘cheating’. Subverting the ‘natural’ game of male philandering and inter-female sexual competition, females backed by male kin establish monopolistic control over their own sexual availability, thereby introducing a new game.

An advantage of this ‘sham menstruation’ model (Power and Aiello 1997; Power, this volume) is that it is archaeologically testable ( Watts , this volume). It also parsimoniously accounts for the evolutionary emergence of initiation ritual (Van Gennep 1960) as the key institutional mechanism for generating and perpetuating the uniquely human domain of counter-reality or ‘symbolism’.

The term ‘counter-reality’ is here used to mean reality inverted or turned upside-down. We may now see how a strategy of menstrually linked sexual and political counterdominance (cf. Erdal and Whiten 1994) would by its internal logic have produced such an effect. Chimpanzees who display the ‘female’ sexual posture of submission to males as a ‘token of respect’ (Goodall 1986: 129, 360) are not turning the world upside-down. By contrast, anatomically modern human females who resisted philanderer males, establishing such resistance as an evolutionarily stable strategy, may well have started a social revolution while constructing a symbolic domain at the same time.

Non-human primate females signal ‘no’ very simply, by displaying sexual lack of arousal or interest. An anoestrous female chimp has no problem in keeping males at bay. Her body itself sends a clear message, and males are unlikely to be interested. Human females, however, have developed continuous sexual receptivity, and the biological human male is liable to ‘read’ the corresponding signals as indicating ‘possible yes’. This confronts women with a rather special challenge. If they are to signal an unmistakable ‘no’, this cannot be ‘left to nature’; deliberate measures may have to be taken.

Signalling ‘yes’ involves an indexical display of individual sexual identity, fertility, readiness, reproductive value and so forth. A moment’s thought will clarify why signalling ‘no’ in the human case would have generated the opposite — communal ‘counter-reality’. The key point is that for a coalition of human females to signal ‘no’ must logically be to reverse the normal body-language displays indicating ‘yes’. To see what this entails, let us take the case of a female chimpanzee in oestrus. In a competitive display, she signals with her rump that she is definitely a chimpanzee (and no other species), definitely female (rather than male) and that she is in her fertile state. We might gloss this as an advertisement conveying three messages: ‘right species, right sex, right time’: From this we may deduce the signals logically indicative of sexual ‘no’ or defiance. The alluring display in the human female case should be reversed, so as to read ‘wrong species, wrong sex, wrong time’. The female coalition, whenever one of its members is menstruating, should not only blur the distinction between themselves and the menstruant, indicating by artifical cosmetics ‘we are all menstruating’ (cf. Power, Watts this volume). They should also dance or otherwise signal in body-language ‘we are animals’ and ‘we are males’. Reality, on this basis, will be countered on all fronts.

ORIGINS OF THE SYMBOLIC DOMAIN

The value of this model is that it accounts for the whole pretend-play game — the game of symbolic cultural production and reproduction — which must be established if speech as a subsystem is to work. This game involves sex, kinship and also economics; its premise is that ‘rules’ operate across the board.

A reality-defining representation is now being staged in direct pursuit of a fitness-enhancing kin-coalitionary strategy of exploiting the provisioning energies of outgroup males. Attempts by such males to fight over, harass or privatize an imminently fertile daughter/sister are resisted.

A young woman’s first menstruation now triggers a performance — a public display of her fertility, marriageability and equally her current inviolability and inseparability from her kin-group. Protecting her may mean forming around her a solid wall of resistance. Signalling ‘no’ to outgroup males involves staging a kind of ‘theatre of the absurd’ — females posturing as ‘male’, humans pretending to be ‘animals’.

The outcome is a simple form of ‘initiation ritual’, triggered by the onset of menstrual bleeding, involving coercive monopoly control over the menstruant, constructing ‘blood’ (real or surrogate) as the ultimate taboo-signal, generating a communal domain of ‘counter-reality’ — and ensuring that the central reality-defying representation is well respected and defended. Members of the ingroup embrace the paradoxical, ‘totemic’ representation (‘wrong species’ etc.) as an expression of their own group identity/inviolability (cf. Durkheim 1912). We would expect outgroup males to perceive the display as deceptive — those supposed ‘males’ are clearly only females, those alleged ‘animals’ really human beings. However, since the ‘deceptive exploiters’ include these males’ own spouses and offspring, the victims will have good reasons to accept the underlying message. For them, the point to grasp is that some things are sacred. In the final analysis, ‘No’ means ‘No’. The pretend-play displays which signal this are literally false. Yet they are ‘true’ on another level — as metaphorical fictions through which communal resistance is expressed. ‘Symbolic culture’ is now enabling cooperation between camps which might otherwise have been constructed as ‘enemies’; such cooperation may be fitness-enhancing, yet in being secured via coercion it is also in a sense ‘unnatural’ (cf. Chase, this volume).

We have now modelled an ‘initial situation’ capturing the essence of human magico-religious ritual and belief (cf. Knight 1991, 1997; Knight et al. 1995). On the one hand, there is currently perceptible reality. On the other, ritual performers are insisting on the secondary status of this reality. ‘Counter-reality’ — a domain in which the sexes merge, ‘sacred’ blood flows and humans metamorphose into animals — is being vigorously asserted, and for moral reasons accorded higher status. Among the Khoisan, menstrual onset triggers a performance known as the ‘Eland Bull Dance’ (Figure 12.1), in which the girl herself is constructed as the ‘Bull’ (Power and Watts 1997; Watts, this volume). Core myths of this kind are not idle fantasies; they have moral, ‘sacred’ status (cf Durkheim 1912; Fontenrose 1959). Anyone who expresses doubt is clearly not entering into the spirit of the game.

Now that the basic principle of symbolism is established, new possibilities for linguistic evolution are opened up. To maintain group cohesion and communal identity in opposition to the outgroup, full performative display — ‘ritual’ — continues to be required, the corresponding costly signals of coalitionary commitment serving internally to authenticate a novel system of low-cost tokenistic communication between conspirators (Knight 1998). Speech can be conceptualized as communal pretend-play, which — along one evolutionary trajectory — becomes adapted for specialised ingroup use to the exclusion of outsiders (cf. Nettle, this volume). The very high levels of ingroup trust now established mean that within each ritually defined coalition, discriminable portions of communally standardized pretend-play can be reduced to vocal tokens — ‘words’. Instead of meeting resistance, use of such tokens in fictional elaboration finds social support, placing conspirators under pressure to externalize complex trains of thought via extended signal sequences. Mental processes, for the first time, can be rendered transparent via a repertoire of low-cost tokenistic substitutes for shared, acted-out representations. Darwinian selection pressures, in this novel situation, favour those most fluent in handling such tokens, each speaker recursively embedding fictions whose mutual relationships remain represented in the mind as bodily gestures (cf.Johnson 1987). Exapting neurophysiological capacities evolved at an earlier stage for handling a system of calls still heavily embedded in mimetic gesture (Armstrong et al. 1994; Donald 1991), syntactical speech now rapidly evolves.

[photopress:sl_as_pp_fig_1.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Fig. 12.1 ‘Wrong sex/wrong species/wrong time’: Southern San rock painting, Fulton’s Rock, Drackensberg Mountains, Natal, South Africa (redrawn after Lewis-Williams 1981: Fig. 10). The image depicts a young woman undergoing her first menstruation ceremony — the ‘Eland Bull Dance. The young woman is shown enrobed within the circular outline of her special menstrual hut. In ritual construction, she is both gender-reversed and species-reversed. She herself is the ‘Eland Bull; around her dance ‘eland cows’ playfully engaged in ‘copulation’ with her. Note the ‘eland tails’ of the female dancers and the barred penises (indicating ritual sexual abstinence) of the males.

If this model is accepted, the first ‘word’ in human language betokened not a physical thing, but a morally authoritative intangible. We can put this another way by saying that the founding speech-act must have been contractually effective (cf. Deacon 1997; Rappaport 1979: 173-221). It invoked the most general of all pretend-play representations, at the apex of the ritually constructed taxonomy. If the earliest language-users had been religious in the contemporary sense, that ‘ultimate’ reality would have been ‘God’. While among southern African hunter-gatherers, wrong sex/wrong species/wrong time yields ‘Eland Bull’ (Power and Watts 1997), in Aboriginal Australia, the same paradoxical negativity yields ‘Rainbow Snake’ (Knight 1983, 1988, 1991: 88-121).At the deepest level, believers strive for certainty via ritual and liturgical invariance (Rappaport 1979). For this reason, certain core features of the founding signal resist change To this day in Christian belief and iconography, Divinity is paradoxically both human male and sacrificial lamb, his blood ensuring rebirth by washing sin away. In the beginning was ‘The Word’ — the performative convening of the human symbolic domain.

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From The Evolution of Culture, ed Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power. 1999.
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK. ISBN 0 748 61076 6.

From Approaches to the Evolution of Language, ed James R Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & Chris Knight.
1998. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, ISBN 0 521 63964 6. 1998

1 Introduction: the Darwinian paradigm

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity.

Modern Darwinism seeks to harmonize research into human life with the rest of scientific knowledge. This project depends, however, on accounting for the emergence of symbolic culture, including speech, a system of communication unparalleled elsewhere in biology. While Darwinians confidently expect an explanation (Pinker & Bloom 1990), it has to be admitted that, to date, no compelling account has been advanced.

In this chapter, I treat speech as a revolutionary development made possible by the establishment of novel levels of social co-operation. In this, I follow Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995), who provide a Darwinian game-theoretic perspective on the origins of human social co-operation, including speech. They view the momentous process as one of a limited number of ‘major transitions’ during life’s evolution on Earth. Each such transition is revolutionary in that it involves a relatively sudden and dramatic restructuring, like the breaking of a log-jam. The preceding barrier to the new level of complexity, discernible with hindsight, arises because, despite any emergent potential for self organization on the higher level (that of the multicellular organism, for example, or the speech-based co-operative community), the necessary co-operative strategies repeatedly lose out to more stable strategies of ‘selfish’ gene-replication on the lower level.

Previous, gradualist, models of language origins ignored such problems, taking speech to be in some absolute sense ‘better’ than a primate gesture-call system. Speech, it is frequently said, allows access to a communal pool of knowledge, saving duplication of effort in trial-and-error direct discovery (Pinker & Bloom 1990: 712). But a primate-style ‘Machiavellian’ social dynamic (Byrne & Whiten 1988) would weigh heavily against reliance on uncorroborated second-hand information. Vulnerability to deceit is costly. Every adaptation has costs as well as benefits; a novel adaptation spreads only if the benefits outweigh the costs. Previous thinking on speech evolution has simply ignored the costs.

2 Darwinism and symbolic culture

Speech differs from a primate gesture-call system in presupposing a wholly new representational level. Through exposure to art, music, dance and other ‘external memory stores’ (Donald 1991), humans from infancy learn to internalize a set of representations essential to the self organization of a cultural community. The representations central on this level are morally authoritative intangibles or ‘collective representations’ (Durkheim 1965). ‘God’, ‘Unicorn’ and ‘Totem’ are among the possibilities. ‘Symbolic culture’, to quote archaeologist Philip Chase (1994), ‘requires the invention of a whole new kind of things, things that have no existence in the “real” world but exist entirely in the symbolic realm. Examples are concepts such as good and evil, mythical inventions such as gods and underworlds, and social constructs such as promises and football games.’ It would be surprising if this new representational level did not bring with it a new level of complexity in communication.

Linguistic reference is not a direct mapping from linguistic terms either to perceptible things or to intentional states; the mapping is from linguistic terms to communal constructs — representations established in the universe of discourse. This universe is structured by people’s ritual and other symbolic experience. While hunting eland in the Kalahari — to take just one example — Zu/’hoäsi will refer to their prey using the ‘respect’ term tcheni — literally ‘dance’. ‘People’, ‘fatness’, ‘menstruation’, ‘gender-ambiguity’ and ‘fertility’ are associated meanings (Lewis Williams 1981; Power & Watts 1997). A complex representation of this kind is not perceptually constrained. The god-like ‘Eland’ of these hunter-gatherers is a communal fiction, connected only in the loosest way to anything existing in the real world.

Not being perceptually verifiable, representations of this kind — the kind to which words are attached — are bound up with anomalous levels of trust and social co-operation; these require ‘special’ explanation (cf. Maynard Smith & Szäthmáry 1995). Theoretical linguists have traditionally avoided the problems by simply assuming the existence of a homogenous speech-community, committed to the co-operative, honest sharing of information. The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991) terms this the ‘assumption of communism’, noting its centrality to formal linguistics since the discipline’s inception. While speech indeed presupposes social co-operation (Grice 1969, 1975), such models distract attention from precisely the problems which, to a Darwinian, most cry out to be addressed. Why, in the human case, can such anomalous levels of co-operation be assumed?

The value of Darwinian theory is that it forces us to consider the barriers to the establishment of co-operation on the necessary scale. In a Darwinian world, individuals who deceive others to make selfish gains, or who ‘free-load’ — enjoying the benefits of society while evading the costs — are likely to have higher fitness than co-operators (Axelrod & Hamilton 1981; Trivers 1971). Attempts to solve this problem by modelling ever-higher benefits from co-operation are self-defeating: the greater the benefits, the greater the gains made by any free-loader who can still reap these while avoiding the costs. Neither can it be objected that lying and cheating, in undermining co-operation, would threaten the extinction of whole groups. Evolution is blind and individualistic. If individual genetic fitness is best pursued through such strategies, selfishness is to be expected regardless of negative consequences at the population level.

3 How animal signals evolve

Politics and power relations are inevitably involved in communication. Krebs & Dawkins (1984) broke new ground by abandoning assumptions about truthfulness and defining animal communication as the means by which one individual, the actor, exploits the muscle power of another, the reactor. Where animals have conflicting interests, they will seek to exploit and deceive rather than share good information, prompting receivers to develop corresponding ‘sales resistance’. As conflict intensifies, signals become restricted to displays of fighting or other competitive ability. Such signals are uninformative except in one narrow respect: they reveal the signaller’s ability to meet the costs of the display. The more discernibly costly the signal, the more impressive it is (Zahavi 1987). As receivers incur fitness penalties for being too impressionable, all but the most costly, elaborate, repetitive and ‘ritual’-like signals are simply ignored. The dynamic culminates in extravagant advertisements such as peacock displays or the roars of rutting caribou bulls.

Where interests converge, however, this dynamic is set into reverse. Instead of resisting and checking out all incoming signals, receivers can now afford to minimize response times, acting on trust. Signals then evolve to become less repetitive and ‘ritualized’, more cryptic, quiet and efficient. Signals may now take more effort to detect and decode, but if the information is valuable, receivers should be motivated to invest that effort. This allows signallers to offload costs of communication onto receivers — minimizing redundancy, lowering amplitude and narrowing the range of utilized channels. The outcome is what Krebs & Dawkins call ‘conspiratorial whispering’. Social insects communicating within well-defended colonies offer examples of such highly informative ‘whispering’.

In the animal world, however, the process of cost-cutting comes up against constraints. Where whole local populations are concerned, interests rarely converge except in relation to a narrow range of challenges such as external threats. Even in this context, any build-up of mutual trust will simultaneously offer scope for cheating. The discrete, species-specific anti-predator alarms of vervet monkeys, for example, are occasionally used deceptively against conspecifics. On hearing an alarm, correspondingly, vervets do not behave as if wholly trusting; they scan the horizon ‘as if they were searching for additional cues, both from the source of the alarm call and elsewhere’ (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990: 107). Admittedly, vervet alarms are honest by default: they would not work otherwise. But it is precisely where listeners expect reliable signals that they are most vulnerable to being deceived.

In the human case, speech as a low-cost, low-amplitude system meets the specifications of ‘conspiratorial whispering’, but by the same token it exposes listeners to the most extreme risks. Linguistic signs are related in an ‘arbitrary’ way to their referents; it is learned convention alone which links a word with its semantic meaning. Such decoupling of signals from emotions and associated real-world stimuli renders listeners highly vulnerable to deception. We would expect ‘Machiavellian’ strategists to resist signals of this kind, setting up negative selection pressures against their evolution.

A thought-experiment may illustrate the problem. Suppose certain unusually intelligent chimps in a wild population develop a repertoire of volitional vocal signals, each with a conventional meaning. Enterprising animals will soon be using these in tactically deceiving each other (Byrne & Whiten 1985). Emission costs will be low, making even small gains worthwhile, putting pressure on all to deceive where possible. On that basis, ingroup trust will rapidly be exhausted, to the point where no-one is listening any more; the system will now be useless for any purpose, honest or dishonest. Zahavi (1993) concludes that, since potential conflicts of interest exist throughout the animal world, even between close kin, resistance to deception has always selected against conventional signals — with the one puzzling exception of humans.

4 Apes: too clever for words?

The problem, then, is that conventional signals depend on trust, whereas those animals intelligent enough to use such signals will also be clever enough to exploit that trust competitively. This may help explain why, despite their cognitive capacities (cf. Ulbaek, this volume), chimpanzees have no natural use for conventional signals. In particular, it clarifies why, in common with other primates, chimps do not vocalize dispassionately, lacking those capacities for cortical control which appear natural in other contexts such as manual gesticulation (Hayes 1950). Such lack of control should not be seen as maladaptive: at stake is the maintenance of credibility. Chimps, like other primates, need reliable signals on which to base their behaviour. Only to the extent that their vocalizations remain governed by the limbic (emotional) system can listeners trust them as reliable cues to internal states.

Admittedly, apes may volitionally suppress their calls. For example, on discovering food, a chimp may with difficulty conceal its excitement, suppressing the associated food-call and succeeding thereby in keeping all for itself. Still more impressively, a group of chimps may maintain silence for hours while patrolling near a neighbouring band’s range. This reflects a group-wide temporary convergence of interests, the suppression of sounds being backed with reprimands (Goodall 1986: 490—491). Once the danger is over and calls can be resumed, however, these are as usual highly emotional. Where calculating manipulation is concerned, the most impressive chimp signals are not their calls but their silences.

For use in deceiving one another, however, primates have resources beyond the purely vocal. In one often-cited incident, an adolescent male baboon was threatened by an approaching group of adults. Instead of running, it stood on its hindlegs and stared into the distance, as if it had noticed a predator. Its pursuers turned to look — and although no danger was present, the distraction enabled the adolescent to escape (Byrne & Whiten 1985). In another incident, a female gorilla, moving with her group, noticed a partly concealed clump of edible vine. Pretending to have seen nothing, she stopped as if to groom herself. As the others moved on, she was able to consume the food undisturbed (Whiten & Byrne (1988:218), citing Fossey). Now, it is true that tricks of this kind would not work unless most such signals were reliable. But it would be a mistake to conclude that ‘primates are usually honest’. The truthful versions of the deceptive signals noted here — genuinely seeing a predator, genuinely stopping to groom oneself — would be examples of incidentally informative functional behaviour, not truthful deliberate signalling. The trust exploited by deceivers has nothing to do with expectations of intentional honesty. On the contrary, the cues habitually trusted as sources of information are valued precisely in proportion as their informational content appears unintentional.

Humans, unlike chimps, can vocalize dispassionately. This is clearly a key capacity essential to the evolution of a convention-based system of vocal communication. Under what selection pressures did it emerge? We know that it is in deceptive use of signals that cortical control most decisively takes over from the limbic system. The literature on primate tactical deception shows how, in being co-opted for deceptive use, functional routines are in a sense ‘displaced’ under cortical, volitional control (e.g. Savage-Rumbaugh & McDonald 1988). It is known that, among humans today, lying typically requires more cognitive effort than truth telling (Knapp & Comadena 1979). Machiavellian manipulations were by inference central to the selection pressures driving neocortex evolution and enhanced cortical control over signals among group-living primates, including evolving humans (Byrne & Whiten 1988). But our problem is to explain how, in the human case, vocalizations became cortically controlled without becoming self-evidently manipulative and so resisted.

Although speech is not intrinsically reliable, conversationalists in fact routinely give one another the benefit of any doubt. The philosopher Paul Grice (1969) has identified mutual intentionality as the heart of human linguistic communication. We humans rely not merely on unintended truthfulness in one another’s signals: where we are on speaking terms, we expect intentional honesty. It follows that without the establishment among humans of a new kind of honesty as a default — habitual honesty in volitional signalling — speech could not have got off the ground. In the human case, then, precisely the most unreliable kinds of signals — namely, the volitional, intentional ones — must have become adapted for honest use. Somehow, in the course of human evolution, what were once frequency-dependent tactical deceptions must have become increasingly routine while becoming simultaneously harnessed to a reversed social function — the group-wide sharing of good information.

Imagine a population in which volitional signals are becoming commonplace, thanks initially to skills in deception. How can a new honest strategy invade the deceptive one and become evolutionarily stable? An immediate problem is that any increase in the proportion of trusting listeners increases the rewards to a liar, increasing the frequency of lying. Yet until hearers can safely assume honesty, their stance will be indifference to volitional signals. Then, even lying will be a waste of time. In other words, there is a threshold of honest use of conventional signals, below which any strategy based on such signalling remains unstable. To achieve stability, the honest strategy has to predominate decisively over deception; yet the evolutionary route to such honesty seems to pass inescapably across a point at which deception is so rampant that trust in volitional signals collapses. How can this conundrum be solved?

There are those (e.g. Konner 1982: 169) who argue that the main function of speech was and remains lying. Such claims may appear persuasive; humans routinely tailor their utterances and the information divulged according to their audience and the effect desired. Yet this view poses as many problems as it solves. Speech is not only a convention-based, radically arbitrary means of communication; it is also (by comparison with primate calls) minimally redundant, low in amplitude and heavily demanding of listeners. Darwinians view these as the tell-tale design-hallmarks of ‘conspiratorial whispering’ — indicating a system designed for communicating good information to trusting listeners at speed (cf. Krebs & Dawkins 1984).

This implies that speech has been co-operative from its inception. In accounting for the necessary honesty, it is tempting to draw on Darwinian reciprocal altruism theory (Trivers 1971): if you lie to me, I’ll never again listen to you — so be honest. But even accepting this, we need to explain why the dynamic did not lead to volitional, conventional signalling among those apes which appear cognitively capable of reciprocal altruism. It would seem that in their case, the logic of tit-for-tat — if you lie to me, then I’ll retaliate — perpetuated the equivalent of a financial crash, in which all paper currency is worthless. What stopped this from happening in the human case?

Reciprocal altruism presupposes a local network of communicators known to each other and likely to meet repeatedly over time. In larger, open populations, deceivers could theoretically escape retaliation by exploiting one gullible victim after another, each in a different locality. Our problem is that a human speech-community is not a personal mutual aid network but is typically an extended group transcending the limits of affiliation on the basis of residence, economic co-operation or kinship. Given an initial situation of primate-style Machiavellian com petition and manipulation, it is difficult to see how an honest strategy could successfully invade and take over so open a population.

5 Individual versus collective deception

In seeking a solution, we may begin by noting that fictions need not be exploitative — in principle, they may be deployed co-operatively, by a coalition. As we have seen, primates on occasion signal deceptively — such imaginative usage arguably prefiguring ‘symbolic’ behaviour. But they do so only for selfish, competitive gain. A primate deceptive representation, therefore, is never valued by others; resistance to it prevents the fiction from being collectively perpetuated or elaborated. Symbolic culture, consequently, cannot even begin to emerge.

The key point, then, is that primates do not engage in collective deception. Humans by contrast deceive collectively, recurrently establishing group identity in the process. Told by his Dorze (southern Ethiopian) informants a patently unbelievable ‘fact’ — that the local leopards were devout Christians, for example — the social anthropologist Dan Sperber (1975: 3) suspected ‘symbolism’. Sperber found this to be borne out regularly enough to suggest a rule-of-thumb: ‘“That’s symbolic.” Why? Because it’s false.’ Nigel Barley (1983: 10) glossed Sperber’s rule as ‘This looks crazy. It must be symbolism.’ Note the implication: far from embodying self-evident truth, symbolic culture may be better understood as a world of patent fictions held collectively to be true on some deeper level.

Myths, dramatic performances, art and indeed all expressions of human symbolic culture may in this light be understood as ‘collusion in deception’ (Knight, Power & Watts 1995; Rue 1994) — collaboration in the maintenance of fictions which have social support. Trust in the founding fictions is not given lightly. Durkheim (1965) indeed showed long ago that a community will place ultimate confidence only in those fictions which are emblematic of itself. If all collude, then on another level the deceptive signal may constitute a performative, constructing its own truth. Ritual specialists may assume the burden of sustaining such circular ‘truths’ on which group identity depends (Rappaport 1979). Note, however, that ingroup/outgroup polarity is central here: one group’s most sacred truths may be another’s transparent deceits. ‘Lies’, to quote Lattas (1989: 461), ‘must be hidden from some and available to others, and as such lies are ordering phenomena, constitutive of groups in their opposition to others.’ A symbolic community is always on some level a secret society, its knowledge inseparable from others’ ignorance and hence its own power in relation to them.

An ability to handle fictional representations, then, is the essence of human symbolic competence Distinguishing between surface and deeper meanings poses a major cognitive challenge; involvement in ‘pretend-play’ during childhood is crucial to the development of the necessary cognitive skills. Pretend-play is the imaginative use of one thing as if it were another. One child may take, say, a pencil, and move it through the air like an aeroplane. Despite knowing that the ‘plane’ is a fiction, the same or another child may still enjoy the pretence. This ability to hold in mind both ‘true’ and ‘false’ implications, handling them on different levels, is central to human mindreading and symbolic competence. A young child who fails to play in this way may be showing early signs of autism or ‘mindblindness’ (Baron-Cohen 1995). Such a child will prioritize literal truth — insisting, for example, that a pencil is just a pencil. Faced with a playmate’s patent fiction, the child shows little inclination to collude.

Effective, creative speech depends on imaginative mindreading skills and hence on collusion in a much wider domain of symbolic behaviour. The concept of co-operative pretend-play is central to our current under standing of how children acquire speech (Bates, Bretherton & Snyder 1988; Bruner 1977; Trevarthen 1979); it is equally central to ‘speech act’ theory (Austin 1978; Searle 1969). Take a seemingly propositional utterance — for example, There are three bison over the hill. As a factual statement, this may appear unconnected with performative invocation or communal pretend-play. Yet in reality, a constellation of ritual assumptions and expectations underpins its force. Faced with scepticism, the speaker might preface the statement with an oath: I swear by the Great Spirit that… . This could involve taking a knife and drawing blood. If listeners need no such costly demonstration, such swearing may be abbreviated or left implicit. But in that case, the speaker must already have paid the ritual costs of getting to a position where his or her utterances have such weight.

According to anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 107): ‘The power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson, and his speech… is no more than a testimony, and one among others, of the guarantee of delegation which is vested in him.’ The words of some derided ‘nobody’ have no weight; we may accuse such a person of ‘talking through his hat’ or ‘talking off the top of his head’. Words emanating from such a source lack what Austin (1978) calls ‘illocutionary force’ — that efficacy which attaches to words when they are accepted as trusted, authorized. If a known liar says ‘I promise’, it is not just that no-one believes; rather, no promise is in fact made. To promise is to enter into a communally sanctioned contract; one individual cannot do this alone. To ‘do things with words’ is to play by the rules of the whole congregation, as if mandated by ‘the gods’; only thus authorized does any utterance work (Bourdieu 1991).

Speech-act theorists (Austin 1978; Grice 1969; Searle 1969, 1983) have established that all effective speech works on this basis. Utterances have force only through collusion with a wider system of ritual or ceremonial. It is this wider system which sustains the communal fictions (gods, spirits, etc.) upon whose authority oaths, promises and comparable declarations depend. The relevant ‘morally’ authoritative intangibles are products of communal ritual (Durkheim 1965): they are ingroup self-representations, frequently ‘misrecognised’ (Bourdieu 1991) as other-worldly beings. Deployed to certify statements as reliable, they reflect communal resistance to deception. In the final analysis, people are on speaking terms only with those who ‘share the same gods’. The magic of words is the collusion of a ritual ingroup. Withdraw the collusion and nothing happens — the speaker’s words are empty sound.

Unlike Machiavellian primates, whose creative fictions prompt countermeasures from those around them, human conversationalists routinely encourage that very resort to imaginative story-telling which in primates is socially resisted. Humans reward one another in the currency of status, conferred by listeners in proportion as utterances appear relevant in addressing some shared concern (Dessalles, this volume). Such status-seeking may appear individualistic and competitive (Burling 1986), but we should remember that there are limits to this. Speakers, whatever their differences, must remain in effect co-religionists — those ‘in the know’ must be trusted to use the discourse for shared purposes, concealing it where necessary from outsiders. Where these conditions are not met, then the relationship of status to relevance may be reversed. When conspiring to rob a bank, for example, the important thing is not to divulge the plan to the authorities. Preparations for war, or for a ritual contest against the enemy team, equally demand discretion. Such cases remind us that ‘relevance’ is defined by a problem shared, and that social boundaries are likely to be decisive. Far from raising one’s ingroup status, being relevant to the wrong people will lower it.

A status-conferring ingroup admits members only at a price. Traditionally — as in the case of Aboriginal Australian male secret societies — the initiatory ordeals tend to be bloody and painful (Knight 1991). Willingness to pay the costs displays commitment; in principle, the heavier the costs, the better. Ritual is the one signal which, in being visibly costly, carries its own authentication — requiring no external corroboration because in principle it cannot deceive (Aunger 1995; Rappaport 1979). Ingroup confidence in other signals, such as cheap vocal ones, can now be based on this ultimate ‘gold standard’. Effective speakers are those who, having paid the costs, are authorized to act ‘in God’s name’ (Bourdieu 1991). Such authority can at any time be with drawn. Under such circumstances, only an incompetent Machiavellian would be tempted to lie.

All this is far removed from primate-style ‘Machiavellian’ politics. Chimpanzees may play, but their playful fictions are not collectively shared. Given such isolation on the imaginative level, intangibles such as ‘promises’ stand no chance of emerging as publicly available fictional representations — no chimp ever swore on oath. Note, moreover, that for a chimp to freely broadcast relevant information would be maladaptive:

opponents would simply take advantage and status would be lost. Chimps, not surprisingly, are as concerned to conceal relevant information as to reveal it. Experts at being poker-faced, they have no interest in having their minds read too easily (De Waal 1982).

6 The origins of ritual

How and why, then, did social life change so dramatically in the human case? Current models (e.g. Dunbar 1993) associate the rapid evolutionary expansion of the hominid brain with increasingly Machiavellian cognitive demands. Darwinian strategies of ‘Machiavellian status escalation’

— coalitionary resistance against physical or sexual dominance by individuals — may account for the emergence of egalitarian social norms of the kind characteristic of modern human hunter-gatherers. Recall the obsequious sexual and other submission-displays central to the signalling repertoire of the social great apes; these contrast sharply with the ‘don’t mess with me’ norms of human hunter-gatherers. If everyone is king, then no-one is. Hunter-gatherer females as well as males show strong aversion to submission (Knauft 1994: 182). Hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, in this Darwinian perspective, becomes established as the capacities of dominant individuals to exploit subordinates become increasingly matched by group members’ ‘counterdominance’ capacities. Under such conditions, a strategy of ‘playing fair’ — resisting dominance by others while not attempting dominance oneself — becomes evolutionarily stable (Erdal & Whiten 1994).

A more detailed speculative model (Knight et al. 1995; Power & Aiello 1997) locates the emergence of symbolic behaviour in counter-dominance strategies driven by the needs of females undergoing reproductive stress as brain-size underwent rapid expansion between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago. Unable to afford monopolization by dominant male philanderers, child-burdened mothers were increasingly driven to meet the costs of encephalization by making use of all available males, mobilizing coalitionary support from male kin in extracting from out-group males increasing levels of mating-effort in the form of provisioning.

Kin-coalitions of females, backed by male kin, brought to a head such strategies by periodically refusing sex to all outgroup males except those prepared to hunt at a distance and bring ‘home’ the meat. Periodic collective withdrawal of sexual access, prompted whenever provisions run low, is conceptualized by Knight (1991) in terms of ‘strike’-action.

One way of testing this model is to ask what kinds of signalling behaviour it would predict. Courtship ‘ritual’ in the animal world is central to a species’ mate recognition system; the basic pattern is one in which females signal to prospective male partners: I am of the same species as you; of the opposite sex; and it is my fertile time. On this basis, we would predict sexually defiant females to reverse the signals to Wrong species/sex/time. This, then, is the predicted signature of ‘sex strike’.

On Darwinian grounds, we would not expect such a message to be transmissible in whispers or in code. For human females to indicate We are males!, We are animals! and Anyway, we are all menstruating! is on one level absurd and implausible. The target audience of outgroup males will have no interest in collusion with such a collective fantasy. To overcome listener-resistance, signallers will therefore have to resort to the most explicit, loud and spectacular body-language possible. A costly, multimedia, deceptive display is now being staged by an ingroup to impress and exploit outsiders.

We now have a Darwinian model of the origins of collective deception through symbolic ritual. Although speculative, it is detailed and specific enough to be testable in the light of archaeological and ethnographic symbolic data. An extremely conservative level of cultural tradition is that of magico-religious symbolism. Southern African archaeologists widely agree that significant continuities in San hunter-gatherer material culture extend back about 25,000 years — the duration of the Later Stone Age (Knight et al. 1995). Checking the model’s predictions against the data on ritual, we find that during the ‘Eland Bull Dance’ of the Kalahari San, held to celebrate a girl’s first menstruation, women motivate males to hunt by defiantly signalling ‘maleness’ and ‘animality’. Specifically, women signal We are Eland! This explains why linguistic reference to this antelope embraces meanings which include ‘people’, ‘dance’, ‘fertility’, ‘gender-ambivalence’ and ‘menstruating maiden’ (Lewis-Williams 1981; Power & Watts 1997). The ‘Eland Bull’ of Kalahari discourse is not a perceptible entity but a morally authoritative construct — a ‘Totem’ or ‘God’. The gender-ambivalent, woman-loving ‘Rainbow Snake’ of Australian Aboriginal tradition equally matches the model’s ‘wrong sex/wrong species’ predictions, as do representations of ritual potency/divinity cross-culturally (Knight 1991, 1996, 1997).

Ritual maintenance of such paradoxical constructs requires elaborate communal pretend-play. Imagine a group of outgroup males faced with a performance such as the ‘Eland Bull’ dance. The women’s ritual identification with this animal of male gender will appear to them implausible — yet unanswerable in being forcibly asserted. Dancers are here asserting counterreality through counterdominance — a strategy of sexual resistance. Challenges would amount to harassment. But while the audience must neither probe nor question, literal belief is equally impossible. Consequently, ‘mindreading’ takes over; belief is displaced to another level. Behind the vivid, dramatic lies, listeners are invited to discern a simple idea: ‘No’ means ‘No’. On this ‘metaphorical’ level, the message indicated by the dancers is certain truth.

Communal self-defence is now inseparable from maintenance of the founding ingroup fiction (cf. Hartung 1995). Such defiance/defence might logically be expected to generate intense and diffuse internal solidarity, including the extension of each coalition to embrace ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ across the landscape (for hunter-gatherer patterns of ‘fictional kinship’ interpreted in this light, see Knight (1991)).

7 The origins of speech

If we are to understand the origins of speech, it is essential to understand first the factors obstructing its evolution in other species. ‘Machiavellian’ primate politics, we have seen, prompts mistrustful listeners to resist all signals except those whose veracity can be instantly and directly corroborated. This immediately excludes (a) volitional conventional signals; (b) displaced reference; (c) signals literally false but metaphorically true; (d) signals meaningful not in themselves, but only in combinatorial contexts. Primate-style resistance to deception, in other words, obstructs the emergence of the characteristics of speech not just on certain fronts but on all fronts simultaneously.

Suppose that whenever I opened my mouth to begin speaking, I found myself instantly challenged, my audience demanding on-the-spot corroboration of the very first sounds, refusing to listen further until satisfied. Denied the chance to express one transparent fiction, modify it by another, modify that in turn and so on, I could hardly display any skills I might have for handling such sequences. Faced with refusal to suspend disbelief even momentarily, I could hardly venture to refer to phenomena beyond the current context of here-and-now perceptible reality. How could I express a fantasy, elaborate a narrative or specify with precision a complex thought, if listeners demanded literal corroboration of each signal as I emitted it, refusing to wait until the end before deciding on a response? Finally, it is difficult to see how my utterance could display duality of patterning if listeners demanded literal veracity on the syllable-by-syllable level, obscuring and resisting the possibilities of meaning or patterning on any higher level.

My freedom to speak presupposes that you, the listener, are trusting enough to offer me, at least initially, the benefit of any doubt, demanding and expecting more information before checking out what I have signalled so far. I need you to be willing to internalize literal fictions, evaluating meanings not instantaneously, item by item, but only as I construct larger patterns on a higher, ‘combinatorial’ level (cf. Studdert Kennedy, this volume). By primate standards, such collusion with my deceits would appear disastrously maladaptive. Why place reliance on transparent fictions? Under the conditions of ordinary primate ‘Machiavellian’ politics, the fitness costs of such cognitive surrender would far outweigh any benefits.

Mistrust, then, sets up — simultaneously and on all fronts — selection pressures obstructing the emergence of speech. An intriguing corollary worth exploring is that by the same token, if sufficiently intense ingroup trust could be generated, it would set up reversed selection pressures simultaneously on all fronts, ‘unpacking’ speech-performance on the basis of capacities already evolved.

Such a model would allow us to break with the tradition in which language appears as a bundle of separate components or features, each requiring its own evolutionary explanation. We could instead treat metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), displaced reference, duality of patterning (both in Hockett (1960)) and syntax (Chomsky 1965) as logically interrelated. Moreover, we could discern a connection with symbolic behaviour more generally, reconceptualizing reliance on speech as a modality of ‘faith’ — reliance on second-hand information, based on faith in the signalling intentions of others.

We may now begin putting all this together. As modelled in the previous section, imagine a broad, stable coalition of females allied to male kin, targeting deceptive sexual signals at outsiders for the purpose of exploiting their muscle-power. The loud, repetitive signals are patent fictions. Not only do they fail to match reality — they systematically reverse it, point by point. But if all are deploying the same fictions, and if this signalling is internally co-operative, then between group members there is no reason to expect resistance. Those colluding in emitting the fictions now have an opportunity to understand one another ‘through’ them. When deployed internally, moreover, pretend-play routines may be abbreviated and conventionalized. Shorthand portions of pretend-play will now act as referents, not directly to anything in the external world, but to recurrent representations within the domain of pretend-play held in common. ‘Displaced’ reference — reference to points in a domain of communal imagination — has now come into being. Note that the condition of this was the emergence, thanks to sexual counter-dominance, of a shared domain of reality-defying deception/fantasy in the first place. In what follows, I address some problems in evolutionary linguistics which this approach may help to explain.

7.1 Conventionalization

Speech — if this model is accepted — is a special case of ‘conspiratorial whispering’. In communicating within an already-established ritual ingroup, there is no need to waste time or energy. There will be minimal resistance to signals, hence no need to repeat, amplify or display. Signallers can abbreviate their pretend-play routines — which, before long, will be so cryptic and conventionalized as to have become, to an outsider, unrecognizable. Convention alone will now link the shorthand gesture to its referent. We need not postulate conscious decision-making to arrive at such ‘arbitrary’ agreements. Instead, given sufficient ingroup trust, a tendency for all signals to begin as ‘song-and-dance’ and gradually to become conventionalized will be an inevitable, automatic and continuous process (cf. Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991; Klima & Bellugi 1979).

7.2 Metaphor

Metaphor — a kind of pretend-play — is central to linguistic creativity and renewal. A metaphor ‘is, literally, a false statement’ (Davidson 1979). React on a literal level, and the signaller will be rebuffed, denied the freedom to ‘lie’. By contrast, where listeners are willing to mindread through such fictions, metaphorical usage will flower. Metaphor counters a process of decay intrinsic to conventionalization. As pretend-play sequences get abbreviated and routinized, so listeners become habituated to them, processing them quickly and almost unthinkingly, the whole mind hardly engaged. This does not matter where purely digital, on/off indications of case, tense or other grammatical properties are concerned: all will have standardized, stereotypical ‘concepts’ on this purely grammatical level, making it immaterial whether communication fully engages the imagination. Conventionalization on this level becomes in fact the secret of speech’s astonishing efficiency. Yet genuine, novel human thoughts arise from the whole mind, and, to communicate these, we correspondingly need to engage the imagination of listeners. To this end, speakers counteract conventionalization, exploring the domain of ritual fantasy in search of fresh and dramatic fictions which can be applied in novel contexts. Metaphors are such fictions. Being literally false, they demand full cognitive involvement on the part of listeners if they are not to be mistaken for deceits.

7.3 Tense/case markers

Pressures to develop markers indicating tense, case and other such properties will now be felt. Note that primates are under no such pres sure. Embedded in the currently perceptible world, their gestures and calls allow listeners to gain all the supplementary information they need simply by checking out the perceptible context of each signal. Metaphorical fictions such as Gods, Unicorns or Eland Bulls have no existence in space or time; listeners wishing to check out the propositional value of any such symbolic usage will therefore need further information. Pressure to connect back to some verifiable position in space/time will drive signallers to find new metaphors capable of specifying such relationships.

7.4 Grammaticalization

As the more costly (‘ritualized’) dimensions of the pretend-play domain become set aside for use against outsiders, the remaining signals — reserved for ingroup use — therefore come under novel selection pressures. Grammatical markers have been shown to be metaphorical expressions which, through a process of long-term linguistic change, have become habitual, abbreviated and formalized. If self-expression through metaphor were blocked — if listeners resisted such fictions instead of exploring the co-operative intentions ‘behind’ them — grammar could not even begin to evolve. The initial raw material for construction of a linguistic form is recurrently an imaginative and dramatic metaphor, potent in proportion as it is ‘displaced’ — uprooted from its original setting and reinserted into a novel, unexpected context. All the morphemes comprising a natural language, including even grammatical items such as prefixes or suffixes marking tense or case, were originally just such imaginative fictions. But in being conventionally accepted and circulated, each has become gradually transformed into an increasingly cryptic signal conveying a more and more well-worn, conventional message (Heine et al. 1991; Kurylowicz 1975).

7.5 Productivity/generativity

While ritual signals are one-way — targeted repetitively, stereotypically and insistently at the outgroup — ingroup communication is intrinsically two-way, with contradiction, questioning and qualification inevitable. With signallers pressed to reveal the contents of their minds, any single pretend-play routine is likely to be deemed insufficient; listeners will demand one such abbreviated signal followed by another and then another, each narrowing the range of possible interpretations. As conventionalization proceeds, each lower-level fictional representation will now be noted and rapidly processed not for its intrinsic value but only as a cue to a higher, combinatorial level of meaning. Signallers are now under pressure to develop skills in assembling uniquely relevant sequences from discrete, recyclable lower-level components (cf. Studdert-Kennedy, this volume). From phonology to syntax, all levels in the emergent hierarchy coevolve.

7.6 Status-for-relevance

To the extent that dual loyalties, conflicts and suspicions no longer characterize ingroup relations, listeners are now in a position to trust all insiders who might potentially offer relevant information, conferring status accordingly (cf. Dessalles, this volume). Note that a ritually organized group may far exceed the size of a kin group or personal mutual aid network.

7.7 Performative force

Words are cheap, making it difficult to understand why they were ever taken seriously. The solution here suggested is that words evolved not in isolation but as part of a system. Ingroup solidarity at outgroup expense was demonstrated through costly ritual display, targeted against outsiders. Ritual performance, in conferring authority on participants, then gave weight to those cheap vocal shorthands which members of each ingroup

— having paid their admission-costs — could now safely use among themselves.

7.8 Vocal—auditory reliance

Within each ritual coalition, ‘conspiracy’ presupposes not only the trusting, group-wide divulging of relevant information but equally its concealment from outsiders. A ‘mimetic’ language of dance or gesture, besides being slow and costly, is vulnerable to eavesdropping: it broadcasts information, but is poorly designed for selectively concealing it. Being in conspiratorial contexts a handicap, self-explanatory gesture is therefore rapidly phased out in favour of reliance on cheap, conventionalized vocal signals permitting exclusion of outsiders through frequent switching of codes (cf. Englefield 1977: 123). The primary ingroup communication system is now fully conventional and one-sidedly vocal-auditory.

7.9 Syntactical competence

Within each ritual ingroup, vocal mini-routines, in being abbreviated and deprived of their former gestural/mimetic medium, assume novel form. With all former pretend-play linkages removed, linear sequences of conventional vocal signals must now bear the full syntactic load. Note that there is nothing specifically vocal about the neural linkages or skills involved: deaf children of hearing parents, deprived of a vocal medium within which to embed and link their gestures, are in a comparable way forced to invent de novo a discrete-combinatorial language out of manual signs (Goldin-Meadow 1993). No sudden genetic reorganization of the brain is required to introduce such novel complexity. For the human mind as already evolved to switch over to the new system, just one new operational principle may suffice (cf. Berwick, this volume). And now, as signal is placed after signal and fiction set recursively within fiction, ‘syntactical complexity’ — previously a property of mindreading (Worden, this volume) and communication through mimetic gesture (Armstrong, Stokoe & Wilcox 1994; Donald 1991, this volume) — floods into the vocal-auditory channel. Signallers must now use a linear stream of coded vocal shorthands to recursively embed fictions whose mutual relationships remain represented in the mind as bodily gestures (cf. Johnson 1987). Exapting neurophysiological capacities for handling a system of calls still heavily embedded in gesture, syntactical speech explosively evolves.

8 Conclusion: the ‘human revolution’

Bickerton (1990, this volume) posits that speech emerged in an evolutionary quantum-jump. Archaic humans possessed ‘protolanguage’ — a vocal system with a substantial lexicon but lacking syntax. Vocal signs were strung together like beads on a string, in the absence of any systematic ordering principles. Then, with the emergence of anatomically modern humans, syntax appeared, caused by a genetic mutation which abruptly re-wired the brain.

In this chapter’s contrasting scenario, something prefiguring ‘syntax’ has long been present, but not initially as a way of ordering combinatorial sequences of conventionalized, abbreviated vocal mini-routines. Pre-modern humans in this model are heavily involved in communal pretend-play or ‘mimesis’ — fantasy-sharing representational activity such as mime, song and dance (cf. Donald 1991); this drives selection pressures for subtle volitional control over emotionally expressive vocalizations and linked gestural representations. At this stage, generativity based on discrete/particulate structure is held back, because signallers must still combine conventional call with emotionally expressive, costly display in each signalling episode, in this respect maintaining continuity with primate ‘gesture-call’ systems (cf. Burling 1993).

Coalition-members during this evolutionary period have shared interests, allowing them to arrive at cost-cutting shorthands in representing food-items, predators and other things. But there is as yet no polarized binary/digital ingroup/outgroup dynamic structuring relationships across the landscape (cf. Knight 1991: 301—304). Instead, kinship-based coalitions and mutual aid networks cross-cut and overlap, with much dual membership, conflicting loyalties and hence internal flux and instability. In this context, it remains as important to withhold relevant information as to divulge it. Almost any listener is potentially a rival, even when currently an ally, blocking the emergence of a group-wide, trust-based, purely conventional system. Signallers continue to rely on their primate-derived ‘hard-to-fake’ signals for cajoling, seducing, threatening and so on, such emotionally convincing body-language still retaining primacy over any shared code. An element of ‘song-and-dance’ therefore remains central to all communication, anchoring and connecting low-cost shorthands or abbreviations in a matrix of more costly gesture — and thereby blocking the emergence of syntax/grammar as an ‘autonomous’ domain. There is ‘syntax’, but only in the sense that there is hierarchical, recursive embedding of one pretend-play fiction within another. The hierarchical ordering central to syntax has yet to become mapped onto a purely conventional linear sequence of signals. Instead, as with modern children in the pregrammatical stage (Zinober & Martlew 1986), pretend-play based largely on gesture still carries the syntactic load, with any conventionalized vocalizations acting as accompaniments.

The human symbolic revolution (Knight et al. 1995) begins to get under way from about 130,000 years ago. At this point, coalitions at last become universalistic, stable and bounded through balanced opposition, each constructing, through communal pretend-play, a shared self- representation — ‘the Eland Bull ‘the Rainbow Snake ‘the Totem’. This morally authoritative enactment — in essence ‘wrong sex/species/ time’ — now functions as the overarching sacred ‘Word’ (cf. Rappaport 1979), authenticating all lower-order semantic meanings and associated vocal markers. It is in this novel social and ritual context that syntactical speech emerges.

A simple ingroup/outgroup model of this kind has one major advantage. We need no longer suppose that humans evolved to become anomalously honest. Humans are dishonest, exploitative and manipulative — in many respects especially so. But this model allows us to see how a profound coalitionary restructuring could have redistributed honesty and dishonesty, co-operation and competition, such that symbolic culture was the result.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Catherine Arthur, Dan Nettle, Camilla Power , Robbins Burling, Adam Kendon, Jim Hurford, Jean-Louis Dessalles and Michael Studdert-Kennedy for critical comments and discussion.

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