9 See Karl W. Butzer, Environment and Archaeology: An Introduction to Pleistocene Geography (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1964), p. 378.
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not be seen as readily as on the bright African savannahs. This evolution may have begun as early as the Third Glaciation Period or possibly even before. But it is only as we are approaching the increasing cold and darkness of the Fourth Glaciation in northern climates that the presence of such vocal intentional signals gave a pronounced selective advantage to those who possessed them.
I am here summarizing a theory of language evolution which I have developed more fully and with more caution elsewhere.10
It is not intended as a definitive statement of what occurred in evolution so much as a rough working hypothesis to approach it.
Moreover, the stages of language development that I shall describe are not meant to be necessarily discrete. Nor are they always in the same order in different localities. The central assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the archaeological record.
The first real elements of speech were the final sounds of intentional calls differentiating on the basis of intensity. For example, a danger call for immediately present danger would be exclaimed with more intensity, changing the ending phoneme.
An imminent tiger might result in 'wahee!5 while a distant tiger might result in a cry of less intensity and so develop a different ending such as 'wahoo'. It is these endings, then, that become the first modifiers meaning 'near' and 'far'. And the next step was when these endings, 'hee' and 'hoo', could be separated from the particular call that generated them and attached to some other call with the same indication.
The crucial thing here is that the differentiation of vocal quali-fiers had to precede the invention of the nouns which they modified, rather than the reverse. And what is more, this stage of speech had to remain for a long period until such modifiers 10 Julian Jaynes, "The evolution of language in the Late Pleistocene," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 280, 1976, in press.
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became stable. This slow development was also necessary so that the basic repertoire of the call system was kept intact to perform its intentional functions. This age of modifiers perhaps lasted up to 40,000 B.C., where we find archaeologically retouched hand axes and points.
The next stage might have been an age of commands, when modifiers, separated from the calls they modify, now can modify men's actions themselves. Particularly as men relied more and more on hunting in the chilled climate, the selective pressure for such a group of hunters controlled by vocal commands must have been immense. And we may imagine that the invention of a modifier meaning 'sharper' as an instructed command could markedly advance the making of tools from flint and bone, resulting in an explosion of new types of tools from 40,000 B.C. up to 25,000 B.C.
Nouns
Once a tribe has a repertoire of modifiers and commands, the necessity of keeping the integrity of the old primitive call system can be relaxed for the first time, so as to indicate the referents of the modifiers or commands. If 'wahee!5 once meant an imminent danger, with more intensity differentiation, we might have 'wak ee!' for an approaching tiger, or "wab ee!' for an approaching bear. These would be the first sentences with a noun subject and a predicative modifier, and they may have occurred somewhere between 25,000 and 15,000 B.C.
These are not arbitrary speculations. The succession from modifiers to commands and, only when these become stable, to nouns is no arbitrary succession. Nor is the dating entirely arbitrary. Just as the age of modifiers coincides with the making of much superior tools, so the age of nouns for animals coincides with the beginning of drawing animals on the walls of caves or on horn implements.
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The next stage is the development of thing nouns, really a carry-over from the preceding. And just as life nouns began animal drawings, so nouns for things beget new things. This period corresponds, I suggest, to the invention of pottery, pen-dants, ornaments, and barbed harpoons and spearheads, the last two tremendously important in spreading the human species into more difficult climates. From fossil evidence we know factually that the brain, particularly the frontal lobe in front of the central sulcus, was increasing with a rapidity that still astonishes the modern evolutionist. And by this time, perhaps what corresponds to the Magdalenian culture, the language areas of the brain as we know them had developed.
The Origin of Auditory Hallucinations
At this point, let us consider another problem in the origin of gods, the origin of auditory hallucinations. That there is a problem here comes from the very fact of their undoubted existence in the contemporary world, and their inferred existence in the bicameral period. The most plausible hypothesis is that verbal hallucinations were a side effect of language comprehension which evolved by natural selection as a method of behavioral control.
Let us consider a man commanded by himself or his chief to set up a fish weir far upstream from a campsite. If he is not conscious, and cannot therefore narratize the situation and so hold his analog 'I' in a spatialized time with its consequences fully imagined, how does he do it? It is only language, I think, that can keep him at this time-consuming all-afternoon work. A Middle Pleistocene man would forget what he was doing. But lingual man would have language to remind him, either repeated by himself, which would require a type of volition which I do not think he was then capable of, or, as seems more likely, by a repeated 'internal' verbal hallucination telling him what to do.
To someone who has not fully understood the previous chapters, this type of suggestion will sound extremely strange and far-
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fetched. But if one is facing directly and conscientiously the problem of tracing out the development of human mentality, such suggestions are necessary and important, even though we cannot at the present time think how we can substantiate them.
Behavior more closely based on aptic structures (or, in an older terminology, more 'instinctive') needs no temporal priming. But learned activities with no consummatory closure do need to be maintained by something outside of themselves. This is what verbal hallucinations would supply.
Similarly, in fashioning a tool, the hallucinated verbal command of "sharper" enables nonconscious early man to keep at his task alone. Or an hallucinated term meaning "finer" for an individual grinding seeds on a stone quern into flour. It was indeed at this point in human history that I believe articulate speech, under the selective pressures of enduring tasks, began to become unilateral in the brain, to leave the other side free for these hallucinated voices that could maintain such behavior.
The Age of Names
This has been an all too brief sketch of what must have been involved in the evolution of language. But before there could be gods, one further step had to be taken, the invention of that most important social phenomenon — names.
It is somehow startling to realize that names were a particular invention that must have come into human development at a particular time. When? What changes might this make in human culture? It is, I suggest, as late as the Mesolithic era, about 10,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. when names first occurred. This is the period of man's adaptation to the warmer postglacial environment. The vast sheet of ice has retreated to the latitude of Copenhagen, and man keys in to specific environmental situations, to grassland hunting, to life in the forest, to shellfish collecting, or to the exploitation of marine resources combined with terrestrial hunting. Such living is characterized by a much