Breaking the chapters of The Mother Tongue down to just three or four parts still left a daunting amount of material to cover in each part. So, I’m going to try to focus on a paragraph or so in each post. I have less to write, you have less to read, things should be published more often: wins all around!
Onward!
Claim:
We have not the faintest idea whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.
Research:
Bryson is right, in that we don’t actually know when the first spoken words that took place. Speech doesn’t leave records behind like writing does.
One way that language age can be estimated is by looking at related languages and determining which words they have in common. This is a whole complicated field, but even in a 1990 paper, languages on the American continent were estimated to be at least 50,000 years old.1
Verdict: Not meaningfully true.
Claim:
What is certain is that mankind did little except procreate and survive for 100,000 generations.
Research:
As we’ll see later, there’s documented tool usage during this time period, which feels like more than Bryson’s dismissive ‘procreate and survive.’
Verdict: False.
Claim:
(For purposes of comparison, only about eighty generations separate us from Christ.)
Research:
At the time of writing, it seems that the generally accepted method of calculating generations was estimating about 20-25 years per generation, thus making Bryson’s comparison adequate for the time period.2 (Of course, by this reckoning, it’s also been about a generation since the book was published.)
More recent research concludes that generations are longer and that 30-35 years is more accurate.3 This would put the number of generations somewhere between 66 and 56, which is much less than Bryson’s calculations.
(100,000 generations, then, is 2-2.5 million years by Bryson’s count, and 3-3.5 million years by recent data.)
Verdict: Mixed.
Claim:
Then suddenly, about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved, lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements.
Research:
Some hypothesize that there was a “great leap forward” around 50,000 years ago, while others believe the development was more gradual.4
The Lascaux cave paintings were estimated in the 1950s to around 15,000 years old; more recent data pushes back that estimate by around 3,000 years.5
Lightweight tools have been around an exceedingly long time:
Human control of fire has been estimated to occur sometime in the Middle Pleistocene era, putting it between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.10
Verdict: False.
Claim:
It is unlikely that any of this could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language.
Research:
Language does seem to be linked to tool usage, in at least some capacity.11 That being said, there are also numerous observations of animals using tools without a ‘sophisticated system’ of language.12
Verdict: Mostly false.
Bryson starts off saying “we don’t know whether spoken language happened 20,000 years ago or 200k” but then talks about a uptick in modern tool usage that occurred 30,000 years ago, which he says couldn’t have happened without sophisticated language development. I understand that it’s a bit of a rhetorical device, but he could have at least picked something outside of that range, like “50,000 years ago or 500,000 years ago.”
Nichols, Johanna. “Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New World.” Language, vol. 66, no. 3, 1990, pp. 475–521. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/414609. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Weiss, Kenneth M., and H. Martin Wobst. “Demographic Models for Anthropology.” Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology, no. 27, 1973, pp. i–186. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25146719. Accessed 13 Dec. 2023.
This article is one of the first to argue that generations should be more than 20-25 years, but it also establishes that that range was the standard at the time.
Helgason, Agnar et al. “A populationwide coalescent analysis of Icelandic matrilineal and patrilineal genealogies: evidence for a faster evolutionary rate of mtDNA lineages than Y chromosomes.” American journal of human genetics vol. 72,6 (2003): 1370-88. doi:10.1086/375453
This term was coined by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1997, but this is a distillation of ideas previously discussed in the field. Diamond cites The Human Revolution, which was published prior to The Mother Tongue, and contains a number of chapters regarding the significant technological shifts of early humans.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. 1997. 6th ed., New York, Norton, 1999, archive.org/details/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Mellars, Paul. “Technological Changes across the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic Transition: Economic, Social and Cognitive Perspectives.” The Human Revolution: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans, edited by Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer, Edinburgh University Press, 1989, pp. 338–365, archive.org/details/humanrevolutionb0000unse_j7l1. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
“Dating the Figures at Lascaux.” Lascaux Cave, archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/lascaux/en/dating-figures-lascaux. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Toth, Nicholas. “The Oldowan Reassessed: A Close Look at Early Stone Artifacts.” Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 12, no. 2, Mar. 1985, pp. 101–120, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0305440385900561, https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(85)90056-1. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Semaw, Sileshi, et al. “Co-Occurrence of Acheulian and Oldowan Artifacts with Homo Erectus Cranial Fossils from Gona, Afar, Ethiopia.” Science Advances, vol. 6, no. 10, 1 Mar. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw4694. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Kouwenhoven, Arlette P. “World’s Oldest Spears.” Archaeology, vol. 50, no. 3, 1997, archive.archaeology.org/9705/newsbriefs/spears.html. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Although this source is after Bryson’s book was published, the article mentions a similar find from 1911 that suggested that spears had been around for a significantly long time.
Yellen, J., et al. “A Middle Stone Age Worked Bone Industry from Katanda, Upper Semliki Valley, Zaire.” Science, vol. 268, no. 5210, 28 Apr. 1995, pp. 553–556, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7725100. Accessed 25 Jan. 2020.
McEwen, Edward, et al. “Early Bow Design and Construction.” Scientific American, vol. 264, no. 6, 1991, pp. 76–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24936943. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
James, Steven R., et al. “Hominid Use of Fire in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene: A Review of the Evidence [and Comments and Replies].” Current Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 1, Feb. 1989, pp. 1–26, web.archive.org/web/20151017032715/faculty.ksu.edu.sa/archaeology/Publications/Hearths/Hominid%20Use%20of%20Fire%20in%20the%20Lower%20and%20Middle%20Pleistocene.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1086/203705. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Gibson, Kathleen. “Tools, Language and Intelligence: Evolutionary Implications.” Man, vol. 26, no. 2, 1991, pp. 255–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2803831. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
Thibault, Simon, et al. “Tool Use and Language Share Syntactic Processes and Neural Patterns in the Basal Ganglia.” Science, vol. 374, no. 6569, 12 Nov. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe0874. Accessed 22 Nov. 2021.
McGrew, W. C., et al. “Chimpanzees, Tools, and Termites: Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Senegal, Tanzania, and Rio Muni.” Man, vol. 14, no. 2, 1979, pp. 185–214. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2801563. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.
This article looks at tool usage across communities of chimpanzees, but it’s far from the only example of this phenomenon.
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Fwiw, this is about the right length for me as a reader too. Although holy smokes even one paragraph will keep you busy!
I wonder, given what we're learning about animal communication, if we'll find that tool usage and language DO go hand in hand. Crows, chimps, ants.....