Introduction

As a paleontologist I have no particular expertise in the matter of precisely how language may have originated, or of its neural substrate, or even of how this most human of attributes might most accurately be defined or characterized. But as a student of evolution I may be in a position at least to suggest in what context language – or at least the potential to produce it – was discovered, and to point out the importance that this discovery may have had in releasing the extraordinary – and very generalized – human capacity that so clearly distinguishes our species Homo sapiens today.

Until rather recently, our hominid precusors were non-symbolic, non-linguistic creatures. That is, they almost certainly more closely resembled other primates than modern human beings in the ways in which they perceived, and communicated information about, the world around them. This is not meant to imply that earlier hominids were unsophisticated in their perceptive and communicative abilities, or even that they were necessarily inferior to us in those qualities. It is just to say that they were different, although that difference may well in the end have made them the losers in the grand competition for ecological space and economic resources that played out in Africa, Europe, and Asia toward the end of the last Ice Age.