The First Word

by By Christine Kenneally

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Of all the dizzying questions devised, “How did language begin?” has to rank near the top. Humans plainly learn to speak by imitation, but back in the beginning who was there to imitate? We can’t talk without a vocabulary and syntax—but where did they come from? All the earlier hominids have long since disappeared, and writing is only 6,000 years old; so how can we ever get a handle on the way Homo sapiens pulled off the most electrifying trick in history? The bad news is we will never fully fathom this mysterious process (and some scholars would even now deny that it was a process, as opposed to a fabulous one-time quantum leap). The good news, thanks to the labors of myriad researchers in linguistics, anthropology, genetics, comparative biology, animal behavior, paleontology, etc., is that we now know far more than we did a few decades ago; and the stream of information, however roiled by controversy, is getting richer every day.

This complex but absorbing story is wonderfully told by This article appears in December 17 2007.