This huge redundant complexity of signaling is essentially devoted to the requisites of the group, its organization into patterns of dominance and subordination, the maintenance of peace, reproduction, and care for the young. Except for signifying potential group danger, primate signals rarely apply to events outside the group, such as the presence of food or water.4 They are totally within group affairs and are not evolved to give environmental information in the way human languages are.
Now this is what we start with. Within a specific ecology, for most species, it is this communication system that limits the size of the group. Baboons are able to achieve groups as high as eighty or more because they have a strict geographical structure as they move about on the open plains, with dominant hierarchies being maintained within each circle of the group. But in general the usual primate group does not exceed thirty or forty, a limit determined by the communication necessary for the dominance hierarchy to work.
In gorillas, for example, the dominant male, usually the largest silver-backed male, together with all the females and young, occupies the central core of each group of about twenty, the other males tending to be peripheral. The diameter of a group at any given moment rarely exceeds 200 feet, as every animal remains attentive to the movements of others in the dense forest environment.5 The group moves when the dominant male stands motion-3 Peter Marler, "Communication in monkeys and apes," Ch. 16, in Primate Behavior.
4 As is known in some birds. See M. Konishi, "The role of auditory feedback in the vocal behavior of the domestic fowl," Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, 1963, 20: 349-367.
5 G. Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
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less with his legs spread and faces a certain direction. The other members of the group then crowd around him, and the troop moves off on its leisurely day’s journey of about a third of a mile.
The important thing here is that the complex channels of communication are open between the top of the dominance hierarchy and all the rest.
There is no reason to think that early man from the beginning of the genus Homo two million years ago lived any differently.
Such archaeological evidence as has been obtained indicates the size of a group to be about thirty.6 This number, I suggest, was limited by the problem of social control and the degree of open-ness of the communication channels between individuals.7 And it is the problem of this limitation of group size which the gods may have come into evolutionary history to solve.
But first we must consider the evolution of language as the necessary condition for there to be gods at all.
T H E E V O L U T I O N O F L A N G U A G E
When Did Language Evolve?
It is commonly thought that language is such an inherent part of the human constitution that it must go back somehow through the tribal ancestry of man to the very origin of the genus Homo, that is, for almost two million years. Most contemporary linguists of my acquaintance would like to persuade me that this is true. But with this view, I wish to totally and emphatically
*6 Glynn L. Isaac, “Traces of Pleistocene Hunters: An East African Example,” in Man the Hunter, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1968).
7 This group size is approximately the same for modern tribal hunters when they are nomadic. But the case is not the same. See Joseph B. Birdsell, “On population structure in generalized hunting and collecting populations,” Evolution, 1958, 12: 189-205.
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The Mind of Man
disagree. If early man, through these two million years, had even a primordial speech, why is there so little evidence of even simple culture or technology? For there is precious little archaeologically up to 40,000 B.C., other than the crudest of stone tools.
Sometimes the reaction to a denial that early man had speech is, how then did man function or communicate? The answer is very simple: just like all other primates, with an abundance of visual and vocal signals which were very far removed from the syntactical language that we practice today. And when I even carry this speechlessness down through the Pleistocene Age, when man developed various kinds of primitive pebble choppers and hand axes, again my linguist friends lament my arrogant ignorance and swear oaths that in order to transmit even such rudimentary skills from one generation to another, there had to be language. But consider that it is almost impossible to describe chipping flints into choppers in language. This art was transmitted solely by imitation, exactly the same way in which chimpanzees transmit the trick of inserting straws into ant hills to get ants. It is the same problem as the transmission of bicycle riding; does language assist at all?
Because language must make dramatic changes in man's attention to things and persons, because it allows a transfer of information of enormous scope, it must have developed over a period that shows archaeologically that such changes occurred.
Such a one is the late Pleistocene, roughly from 70,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. This period was characterized climactically by wide variations in temperature, corresponding to the advance and retreat of glacial conditions, and biologically by huge migrations of animals and man caused by these changes in weather. The hominid population exploded out of the African heartland into the Eurasian subarctic and then into the Americas and Australia.
The population around the Mediterranean reached a new high and took the lead in cultural innovation, transferring man's cultural and biological focus from the tropics to the middle lati-
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tudes.8 His fires, caves, and furs created for man a kind of transportable microclimate that allowed these migrations to take place.
We are used to referring to these people as late Neander-thalers. At one time they were thought to be a separate species of man supplanted by Cro-Magnon man around 35,000 B.C. But the more recent view is that they were part of the general human line, which had great variation, a variation that allowed for an increasing pace of evolution, as man, taking his artificial climate with him, spread into these new ecological niches. More work needs to be done to establish the true patterns of settlement, but the most recent emphasis seems to be on its variation, some groups continually moving, others making seasonal migrations, and others staying at a site all the year round.9
I am emphasizing the climate changes during this last glacial age because I believe these changes were the basis of the selective pressures behind the development of language through several stages.
Calls, Modifiers, and Commands
The first stage and the sine qua non of language is the development out of incidental calls of intentional calls, or those which tend to be repeated unless turned off by a change in behavior of the recipient. Previously in the evolution of primates, it was only postural or visual signals such as threat postures which were intentional. Their evolution into auditory signals was made necessary by the migration of man into northern climates, where there was less light both in the environment and in the dark caves where man made his abode, and where visual signals could 8 See J. D. Clark, “Human ecology during the Pleistocene and later times in Africa south of the Sahara,” Current Anthropology, 1960, 1: 307-324.