The archaeological evidence for early man in the Americas suffers further because there are no securely dated sites in Alaska earlier than the Bluefish caves in the eastern Yukon Territory, which date to between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago.24 Nevertheless, there is little doubt that there are many features common to both sides of the Beringia area. One element is the ‘Northwest Microblade’ tradition, a particular type of microblade, which was wedge-shaped and made from a distinctive core, found all over Beringia.25 These cores have been associated with one site in particular, Denali, which, according to F. Hadleigh West, is the eastern outpost of Dyukhtai culture, with at least twenty locations in Alaska. (Denali is situated in and around Tangle Lakes in Alaska.) Dyukhtai culture is no older than 18,000 years ago and Denali was gone by 8000 BP.26 That early man crossed the Bering land bridge between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago is also supported by details from the Meadowcroft rock shelter in western Pennsylvania, where remains have been calculated, on eight separate occasions, to between 17,000 and 11,000 BC. And by the fact that the presence of early man at Tierra del Fuego, ‘the end of the road’ at the southern tip of South America, has been dated to about 9000 BC. However, there are still doubts about the dating of Meadowcroft, where the remains are corrupted by the presence of coal, which may make it seem older than it is.
Early man’s discovery of the New World may not seem, on the face of it, to fall into the category of ‘ideas’. But there are three reasons for including it. One is because the conquest of cold was a major advance in early humans’ capabilities. Second, in being cut off for so long, and from such an early date (say 15,000 BP to AD 1492, 14,500 years, and ignoring the possibility of Norse contacts, which were abortive) the parallel development of the Old World and the New provides a neat natural experiment, to compare how and in what order different ideas developed. Third, as we shall now see, this separation throws crucial light on the development of language.
George Schaller, as mentioned before, has pointed out that lions hunt game in groups – fairly successfully – without the benefit of language. We cannot say, therefore, that as man turned to the hunting of big game he necessarily had more than the rudiments of language. On the other hand, it would seem highly unlikely that he could manufacture standardised tools, or cave paintings, or beads, without language. But these are all inferential forms of evidence. Is there anything more direct?
We have to remember that many of the skulls of ancient men and women, on which these studies are based, have been in the ground for as much as 2 million years, with rock and earth bearing down on them. Their present-day configuration, therefore, may owe as much to those millennia of pressure as to their original form. Nevertheless, with this (all-important) proviso in mind, we may say as follows. Modern studies, of people living today, show that two areas of the brain are chiefly responsible for language – what are called Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area is located in the left hemisphere, towards the front of the brain, and about halfway up. Individuals with damage to that area generally lose some of their facility with words. Wernicke’s area, slightly larger than Broca’s area, is also in the left hemisphere, but behind it, also about halfway up. Damage to Wernicke’s area affects comprehension.27 There is much more to the brain than this, of course, in relation to language. However, studies of the skulls of H. habilis show that Broca’s area was present with the earliest of the hominids but not with the australopithecines. Pongids (apes), who lack Broca’s area, cannot produce any human speech sounds and they further appear to lack intentional voluntary control of vocal signals: for example, they cannot suppress food-barks even when it is in their best interest to do so.28 On the other hand, several experiments in the late twentieth century show that chimps possess a nascent language ability in that, although they couldn’t speak, they could learn American Sign Language. This suggests (to some) that language ability is very old.29
In line with such reasoning, each of the skulls unearthed at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 95,000–90,000 BP, had a completely modern supra-laryngeal vocal tract: ‘These fossil hominids probably had modern speech and language.’30 Palaeontological anatomists also find no reason why early humans should not have had modern syntax.31 This suggests that H. habilis had a form of language, more sophisticated than the half-dozen or so calls that may be distinguished among chimpanzees and gorillas, but still not a full language in our sense of the term.
The only hyoid bone (important in speech, linked by muscle to the mandible, or lower jaw) to be found on a palaeontological site was discovered in the summer of 1983 in the Kebara cave on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. The skeleton discovered there was dated to 60,000 BP and was labelled Mousterian – i.e., Neanderthal. According to B. Arensburg, of Tel Aviv University, the hyoid bone of this creature ‘resembles that of modern man in configuration and size’ and ‘casts a totally new light on the speech capability of [Neanderthals] . . . Viewed in anatomical terms, it would seem that Mousterian man from Kebara was just as capable of speech as modern man.’32 Neanderthal ear bones recovered in 2004 from excavations in Spain showed that ‘their hearing was attuned to pick up the same frequency as those used in human speech’.
There are a number of other inferences that may be made about early thought, stemming from the inspection of tools and the behaviour of early man and of primates and other mammals. One is the standardisation of stone tools. Is it possible for this to have happened, say some palaeontologists, without language? Language would have been needed, they argue, for the teacher to impress upon the student what the exact form the new tool should be. In the same way, the development of elaborate kin systems would also have required the development of words, to describe the relationships between various relatives. Some primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, have rudimentary kin systems: brothers occasionally recognise each other, and mothers their offspring. But this is not highly developed, is inconsistent and unreliable. Gorilla ‘family units’, for example, are not kin groups as we would recognise them.
One very different piece of evidence was unveiled in 2002 (this was mentioned earlier, in a different context). A team led by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announced in August that year that it had identified two critical mutations which appeared approximately 200,000 years ago in a gene linked to language, and then swept through the population at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans spread out and began to dominate the planet. This change may thus have played a central role in the development of modern humans’ ability to speak.33 The mutant gene, said the Leipzig researchers, conferred on early humans a finer degree of control over the muscles of the face, mouth and throat, ‘possibly giving those ancestors a rich new palette of sounds that could serve as the foundation of language’. The researchers did not know exactly what role the gene, known as FOXP2, plays in the body, but all mammals have versions, suggesting it serves one or more crucial functions, possibly in foetal development.34 In a paper published in Nature, the researchers reported that the mutation that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees occurred quite recently in evolution and then spread rapidly, entirely replacing the more primitive version within 500 to 1,000 human generations – 10,000 to 20,000 years. Such rapid expansion suggests that the advantages offered by the new gene were very considerable.