The origins of literature

The exact form of the first languages is long lost. Writing was not invented until the Neolithic era, and recording equipment even later. The best we can do is look for indirect clues from fossils and social evidence.

The anatomy that made language possible was already present in the first anatomically modern humans 130,000–200,000 years ago. Whereas four-footed animals must breathe in time with their steps, bipedalism allowed us to control our breathing — a prerequisite for speech. We also have a descended larynx, a relatively small and mobile tongue, etc. This does not mean for certain that our species had language from the outset, but it would be remarkable if we had evolved this equipment without using it. It would also be remarkable if that skill had developed in isolation from others, such as symbolic behaviour. Thinking and talking and symbolism evolve together.

The sign

The earliest language was probably mimetic: an imitation of human, animal and natural sounds, but this could never provide the full range of sound and meaning correspondences we needed. Language is mostly arbitrary — “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” — and cannot exist without symbolism. Its users have to agree that certain sounds have a collectively recognised meaning, are a symbolic substitution for things we have experienced.[1] Thus our ancestors may have hissed in imitation whenever they saw and heard a snake. After enough repetitions, the hiss would become symbolic of ‘snake’ even when the snake was not there. Through abstraction they had created a word.

With abstraction, objects and experiences became signs, patterns, symbols. The Russian linguist Valentin Voloshinov, in his classic Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), argued that “any physical body may be perceived as an image”, that is, it may be converted into a ‘sign’.

Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside of itself. In other words, it is a sign.[2]

Signs allow our consciousness to interact with external reality. Voloshinov is right to stress ideology. A naturally occurring object simply exists, whereas a sign, as a human creation, cannot but take on a specific, socially mediated human meaning. “The physical object is converted into a sign. Without ceasing to be a part of material reality, such an object reflects and refracts another reality.” Signs, including words, are mediators that convert our concrete experience into ideological, symbolic forms.

This probably first served as a means to share information about food-gathering and dangers, share cultural behaviours, etc — early humans may have mimed a predator, together with an agreed vocal signal for that predator. And it is more efficient to tell the community where it can find an animal carcass than for individuals or hunting parties to retrace their steps to show others where it is. It became possible to gain knowledge of a thing, via someone else’s report, that one had not experienced oneself, and include this third party experience in one’s own calculations. This was another gain in the efficiency and effectiveness of learned behaviour.

Ernst Fischer said:

All tools of a particular kind, it will be remembered, came out of the first tool of which they were an imitation or copy. The same is true of many other abstractions: the wolf, the apple, etc. Nature is reflected in newly discovered connections. The brain no longer reflects each tool as something unique; nor does it reflect every seashell in that way. A sign has been evolved to cover all tools, all seashells, all objects and living things of the same kind. This process of concentration and classification in language makes it possible to communicate more and more freely concerning the outside world, which man shares with all other men...

Language not only made it possible to coordinate human activity in an intelligent way and to describe and transmit experience and, therefore, to improve working efficiency: it also made it possible to single out objects by attaching particular words to them, thus snatching them out of the protective anonymity of nature and bringing them under man’s control.[3]

Creative language

In combination with an advanced brain, words also created the possibility of creative, for example metaphorical, expression. The explanation of how to find a carcass becomes the story of a kill, with the recreation of emotions, gestures, and what the participants said, and becomes a kill that never actually happened.

Let us recall Marx, who said:

The poorest architect is distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built it in his head. The result was already present at its commencement, in the imagination of the worker, in its ideal form. More than merely working an alteration in the form of nature, he also knowingly works his own purposes into nature; and these purposes are the law determining the ways and means of his activity, so that his will must be adjusted to them.[4]

Using language to recount something that has happened in the past already implies a certain conscious control of one’s own experience. To tell a story means being able to model the entire narrative in one’s mind before one embarks upon it, just as Marx’s architect plans a building. Our dependence upon learned behaviour meant that when we imitated a comrade to make a handaxe, we knew in advance what we were making, having an ‘ideal’ or ‘best’ handaxe in mind as our goal. This allowed our abstraction of experiences and things into concepts and symbols. Here is Voloshinov again:

Signs also are particular, material things; and, as we have seen, any item of nature, technology, or consumption can become a sign, acquiring in the process a meaning that goes beyond its given particularity. A sign does not simply exist as a part of reality — it reflects and refracts another reality. Therefore, it may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth. Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc).[5]

As we developed language, we gave names to things. Thereby we acquired power: partly in a social sense, because we could issue instructions to our fellows and see them acted upon, but also because we could bring the named things under our control. This is another aspect of the humanisation of nature: a named thing has been assigned a place within a structure of human making. There is an ancient belief, probably rooted in this discovery, that by possessing a thing’s or person’s name we gain power over it. The Bible, for example, claims that “in the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), and that God gave Adam the right to assign names to all the living creatures in Creation (Genesis, 2:19). We see here a correspondence with the idea of sympathetic magic — a thing and its name are somehow causally connected, so that controlling the latter through the human power of language gives influence over the thing too.

Human culture is a learned and not an instinctive behaviour. Therefore, we needed an oral means to pass on tribal lore and our attempts to make intellectual sense of what we saw of the world. In an age where we had language but did not yet have writing, we needed help in memorising these huge narratives so that they might be passed to succeeding generations. To this end we developed verbal techniques like alliteration and rhyme, simile and metaphor, drawing not only upon the powerful effect of symbols upon the imagination but upon the characteristics of words themselves to make them more vivid, more memorable — a unity of both form and content. This is how, in time, simple accounts, stories and folklore evolved into the powerful myths of oral literature. The earliest literature was a communal inheritance, compiled and modified over many years by a succession of storytellers [6]. The sense of shared myths and stories would also have helped bond the social group. These were the beginnings of literature.

As society developed, new abstractions, new words, were introduced. There was no word for ‘painting’ until we had acquired the skill, just as nobody thirty years ago would know what you meant by the ‘internet’. The increasing complexity and diversity of our experience led to increasing complexity and diversity in our signs.

It is likely that language was so important that it actually became (partially) genetic. Chomsky famously proposed, as we have mentioned before, that we are pre-programmed to absorb linguistic structures — what he called ‘universal grammar’.

Gustave Doré’s image of the Tower of Babel, ‘The Confusion of Tongues’.

Of course, each language is culturally specific. Human communities that had no contact with one another developed private sets of symbols that were understood to them, and to neighbours, but not to people thousands of miles away. Different communities had different environmental experiences — prey animals, weather, local materials, and so on — and thus developed signs completely unknown to others. Thus, despite our common humanity and ability to communicate mimetically (such as miming hunger or fear), we don’t understand each other’s languages, because these are arbitrary and abstract.

Marxism makes a very important assumption in its theory of language: it believes that these abstractions refer in a meaningful way to aspects of objective reality, even though this relationship is complex. This places it at odds with structuralism and postmodernism, which argue that consciousness and ideology are themselves the product of language. In the postmodern view, we can never escape the web of discourses to an objective truth (as Jacques Derrida put it, “There is nothing outside the text”). This is a debate that we will explore another time.

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[1] The uniformity of all living humans — their DNA differences are minor and limited to physical appearance — means we can communicate with one another even when we do not share a language. Of course there is regional variation in how particular gestures are understood. But we can all communicate basic human needs and feelings mimetically. We all have the same ‘species-being’ in common, despite the huge variety in our personal experiences.
[2] Valentin Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, (1929). A part of the intellectual flowering that followed the Russian Revolution, Voloshinov was associated with the circle around Mikhail Bakhtin. The link is to a couple of extracts rather than the full text, which is apparently still in copyright.
[3] Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (1959).
[4] Marx, from ‘The Labour-Process And The Process Of Producing Surplus-Value’ from Capital, vol. 1 (1867).
[5] Voloshinov, op. cit.
[6] For this interpretation of oral literature we are indebted to the early twentieth-century scholar Milman Parry, whose particular study was the Homeric poems. Some bourgeois theorists dislike the social conception of art because they want art to be rooted in the individual. But only very late in human history did it become customary for literature to be the work of individuals and have authorial names attached to them.

The acquisition of language

The very earliest human societies did not have a system of writing. Instead they relied on a tradition of oral literature [1] in which they recited and sang stories. In a pre-literate age, oral storytelling was a way to preserve knowledge, history and culture, a method which survived the invention of writing and provided the basis of the epics attributed to Homer, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Finnish Kalevala, etc.

To understand the roots of literature, of course, we need to understand the roots of language.

How we developed language

Language is unique to humans. It evolved only in ourselves, in only one way (which we are still trying to figure out).

Like many species, our primate cousins use all manner of grunts, calls and other noises to communicate with one another, often accompanied with gestures and other body language. These convey a variety of meanings understood by the whole group: to raise an alarm about an approaching predator, threaten a rival, announce the discovery of food, indicate contentment, etc. The earliest humans must have used a similar system of communication. The Finnish researcher Lea Leinonen even found that people could recognise the emotional content of calls made by macaque monkeys, suggesting that we have a common ‘primate inheritance’ in how we communicate emotion vocally.

The great apes, however, have a limited range of vocal behaviour even compared to other primates such as geladas [2], and birds are more vocally gifted than any mammal. The roots of language in primate communication are interesting, but there is a tremendous qualitative gulf between language and all other known forms of animal communication. This is not simply a matter of greater complexity. As the neuroscientist and anthropologist Terrence Deacon has pointed out [3], there are no ‘simple’ languages used by other species; however sophisticated animal communication gets, no animal other than humans uses words. The real key difference is that unlike us, they never developed symbolic communication.

The origins of language in human beings lie in our evolution through labour.

Just as tools developed dialectically with our brains and hands, toolmaking assisted our acquisition of language — language may itself be seen as a kind of tool. The more we explored our environment, acquired power over it, and entered new relationships with it, the more our communication needed to embrace new concepts. The comparatively rudimentary communication used by animals to signal alarm, threat, and so on was no longer adequate. The process was summarised by Engels:

The mastery over nature, which begins with the development of the hand, with labour, widened man’s horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown, properties of natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by multiplying cases of mutual support, joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to one another. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.[4]

Engels observes that some other animals have the capacity for speech — most famously the parrot — but:

The little that even the most highly-developed animals need to communicate to one another can be communicated even without the aid of articulate speech.[5]

Animals’ ability to acquire language was studied by researchers at Columbia University from 1973 when they brought up a chimpanzee, from birth, with a human family. Mischievously named after Noam Chomsky, Nim Chimpsky was treated like a human child and picked up 150 characters of sign language. But despite spending four years in this environment, he did not develop any advanced language skills. The experiment seemed to confirm Chomsky’s belief that human language behaviour was too complex to learn from the environment alone: the linguist also needed a human linguistic intelligence, able to absorb language into a pre-programmed structure.

In the 1990s, researchers at Georgia State University revealed that a bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) named Kanzi was capable, remarkably, of understanding spoken English. In addition, they claimed he could create sentences — in other words, had grammar. Using symbols, Kanzi created two-word combinations which, the researchers argued, tended to place an action word before an object word. He would therefore say ‘hide ball’ rather than ‘ball hide’. What the researchers could not overcome was that Kanzi’s linguistic skills approximated to those of a child of two, and only a vast amount of human intervention got him even to that stage. Like Nim Chimpsky, Kanzi showed general intelligence and cleverness, but no evidence of an ability to use language beyond the most basic level. Given that chimps do not possess language or even the physical equipment for it, this should surprise nobody.

Many animals have developed means of communication which are much more sophisticated than Engels and his contemporaries would have assumed. This doesn’t stop us concluding that language, like labour, is a human characteristic: even though Kanzi shows us that there is no cast iron dividing line. Language would not have been possible without certain biological changes such as the descension of our larynx, which extended the vocal tract and enabled us to make much more complex sounds than, for example, our great ape cousins (we make most of our vocal sounds by contracting the laryngeal muscles). This was partly aided by our upright stance. Also, our dietary trend away from chomping plants towards meat-eating gave us smaller teeth and jaws that affected the shape and capability of our mouths, lips and vocal tract. But biology on its own explains little. Humans are not the only species to have a descended larynx — we share this feature with, for example, lions, deer and some aquatic mammals. It was the extension of our consciousness through labour that introduced to us new relationships that could not be adequately communicated using the vocabulary of primate sounds, and demanded something different.

These processes, like all processes, interact with one another and develop side by side. Engels again:

First comes labour, after it, and then side by side with it, articulate speech — these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its similarity to the former is far larger and more perfect... The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement, gave an ever-renewed impulse to the further development of both labour and speech.[6]

Toolmaking — the creation of human-made objects — taught us abstraction: the more we made objects with characteristics so similar that they shared a function, we discovered the need for a name, not just for, say, an individual spear, but for ‘spears’ in general. Thus we created an abstract category of ‘spears’ that united many objects with similar characteristics. Humans had managed to turn objects into concepts. This followed from the separation of human beings from nature: we learned to translate ourselves and our works into abstract terms.

At some point we probably began to break up our utterances, in which a single cry or call represented an entire message, into constituent parts. Instead of a call for ‘big eland’, we might have split the concepts of ‘big’ and ‘eland’, and then been able to combine those elements with other separate elements. According to archaeologist Steven Mithen, this meant we could “create an infinite array of new utterances. This is the emergence of compositionality, the feature that makes language so much more powerful than any other communication system.”[7]

The social character of language

The new level of communication helped us to develop our social organisation by sharing experience and improving technique. At the same time, language is itself social in origin. Neither aspect ‘caused’ the other, instead they developed in combination. Language is inevitably social in character, because humans are a social species. Marx and Engels understood this:

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men... Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.[8]

Primates are unusual in that they live in tightly-knit groups. This helped to provide protection against predators much more formidable than ourselves. The more group members there on watching for predators, the greater is the chance they can be avoided, and the more help there is on hand to drive them away. For primates that are starting to eat or even hunt meat, it is also to their advantage to have several hunting parties searching simultaneously to increase the chance of success — once the big meat package is found, it can be shared amongst all the group’s members.

Group living was a positive adaptation, but it introduced new complexities, such as the need for hierarchies and alliances to regulate internal competition over food. As the size of human social groups grew over the millennia, so too did the complexity of social behaviour. All primates use vocalisations to communicate a variety of signals, but language, propelled by particular human needs, took this to an unprecedented level. A sobering aspect of the descension of the larynx is that the lower tracheal opening makes it easier for us to choke upon food. That we were prepared to trade this potentially fatal problem against language tells us a great deal about how important it was to us.[9]

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has estimated that the number of people of whom we could have social knowledge grew from 50 per group six million years ago to 150 for early Homo sapiens. He argued that primates place great social importance upon grooming as a means of building alliances and gaining social information [10]. As group sizes increased, the amount of time needed to groom effectively became untenable. Language was the replacement — instead of limiting our communication to when we tidied each other’s dirt and parasites, we shared social information in a much more efficient way, without needing social contact with the people under discussion. Group size, brain size and language ability all increased as we evolved. Homo sapiens communities may also have experienced greater differentiation in roles, exchange with other groups, and other more complex social needs that encouraged language.

It is very difficult to fix a date for the first use of language because there is no way for it to be preserved. It cannot be less than 195,000 years ago, the age of our first fossil evidence for anatomically modern humans. The genetic leap seen in Homo habilis 2 million years ago may already indicate a vocal ability beyond that of other primates, and this ability will have increased with subsequent evolution. True language may first have been possible in a rudimentary form as long ago as Homo erectus. In Neanderthals the vocal tract, hyoid bone and other indicators were present, making language likely. Given the genetic similarity of all Homo sapiens, from 60,000 years ago to today, and the universality of language to all human populations, it is hard to see how language would not have been one of the faculties that our ancestors took with them from Africa before they dispersed across the world.

Nonetheless, the clear qualitative difference between early and modern human minds makes the question of how gradually or suddenly language was acquired, and how it relates to the rise of art and culture, a matter of ongoing debate. Some archaeologists have proposed that there was a ‘human revolution’ of art and culture around 40,000 years ago, and it would be astonishing if we had not had language at that time. This timescale for the first appearance of art dates it considerably later than the likely first appearance of language. Recent evidence from Africa has led some archaeologists to suggest that the ‘revolution’ might have started much earlier, begging speculation on whether the two are related, but evidence for consistent symbolic activity dating further back than 40,000 years is slight.

Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, which claims that the capacity to learn language is to some degree innate to all (modern) human beings, has yet to be proved. An alternative to Chomsky’s theory has been put forward by Terrence Deacon [11]. Children have such a gift for acquiring language that it seems it must be innate, but Deacon argues that children’s predisposition is of a different sort. Just as computer scientists developed Graphical User Interfaces such as Microsoft Windows to make intimidating computers easier for the general public to use, so language has adapted to the natural biases of human learning. The reason animals can be trained to perform spectacular ‘tricks’ is that the human trainers select from among the animal’s natural repertoire of behaviours and simply encourage them. Languages are very changeable and evolved spontaneously, not by design — those that can be quickly learned by children by conforming to their expectations will tend to be passed on more than those that are difficult. The elements universal to all languages, writes Deacon, actually arose independently in each language, which may seem hard to believe until one thinks of each language adapting to the same, universal set of human biases. These biases — such as the neurological bias that generates similar colour terms across all societies — may be very weak, but over many millennia of evolution their cumulative effect becomes determining. So language is acquired via a social evolutionary process, not a rigid pre-programmed structure.

Additional support for the case against Chomsky’s idea has been outlined by the anthropologist John Hawks:

There are strong evolutionary reasons to doubt the existence of a Universal Grammar. In short, no single language uses all (or even most) of the rules included in Universal Grammar. So the phenotype (behavioural expression) of nearly all the people in any human population must not include many of those rules. If this is true there is certainly no way that natural selection (which can operate only on phenotypes) could result in Universal Grammar being included in most people’s brains.[12]

It remains possible that a kind of common template for language did develop, given the profound importance of language for our evolution and social organisation. But this would not mean that language may be seen mechanically or biologically. Such a view makes language autonomous and genetic, denied its link to real life and to its human, creative character. That language has a social character is so obvious it should scarcely need saying, as the very purpose of language is communication between people. Bourgeois linguists sometimes however try to make language a self-contained system independent of society. Such an approach fails to prioritise real language as it is spoken by real people.

Language in fact is subject to change — in its words, grammar, etc — and the origin of this change cannot be understood without a social and historical context. The Marxist view was summarised neatly by Marnie Holborow: “Language arises from the social demands and needs of the material world and also, through human cooperation and activity, contributes to the transformation of that world. It is then itself transformed as human society changes.”[13] Or in Deacon’s words, “Language is a social phenomenon. To consider it in purely formal, psychological or neurobiological terms is to strip away its reason for being.”

Language is not inevitable

To finish, it is important to note that it would be wrong to see language as the pinnacle of an inevitable evolutionary process towards more complex, higher forms of communication. It is tempting to try to apply this ‘progressive’ aspect of the dialectic to the sweep of evolution, but to do so is inappropriate. Evolution is about organisms finding a best fit to their environment, and most living things have never ‘progressed’ beyond a single cell. It is simply that at one point in our development, language happened to help our species fill a particular evolutionary niche. As Deacon puts it, “the niche was just there, and was eventually filled.”[14]

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[1] Given that ‘literature’ implies writing, the term is an oxymoron, but we do not have a better one. One possibility would be Pio Zirimu’s term ‘orature’.
[2] See for example Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[3] Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain (1997).
[4] Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[8] Marx and Engels, from ‘Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks’ in The German Ideology (1845).
[9] A contrary view has been put forward by British palaeontologist Margaret Clegg, who found by studying medical records that death by choking on food is extremely rare. Mentioned by Mithen, ibid.
[10] Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1997).
[11] Terrence Deacon, op. cit.
[12] John Hawks, ‘Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species’ (Jan 2005).
[13] Marnie Holborow, ‘Putting the Social Back Into Language’, adapted 2006 from a chapter of her book The Politics of English (1996). Holborow’s essay is a good short introduction to the Marxist theory of language.
[14] Terrence Deacon, op. cit.