This essay originally appeared i n Current Anthropology Volume 14,Nos. 1-2, February-April 1973.

Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language1

by Gordon W. Hewes

THE NOTION THAT MAN'S FIRST LANGUAGE was primarily gestural, carried on with hand and arm signals rather than vocal sounds, has been supported by a distinguished line of scholars: Condillac (1746), Tylor (1868, 187 l), Morgan (1877:35n), Wallace (1881, 1895), Romanes (1888), Wundt (1912), Paget (1944, 1963), and Johannesson (1949, 1950). The gestural theory seems to be the most attractive of the many glottogonic hypotheses advanced so far, and receives support from recent studies of chimpanzees and other primates, such as Gardner and Gardner (1969, 1971), Premack (1970a, b, 1971), and Menze1(1971), as well as from other sources. The fact that this evidence was unavailable to earlier proponents of the gestural theory explains some of the weaknesses in its former formulations. General reviews of language origin theory can be found in Diamond (1959), E. Critchley (1967), Fano (1962), Gray and Wise (1959), Kainz ( 1943-65), Rosenkranz (196 l), Rossi ( 1962), and Sommerfelt (1954).2Nearly all the theories of the origin of language assume that man's language is

connected with his superior intelligence and that it depends on more than the presence of organs capable of producing sounds. Language is any system of animal communication which exhibits most of the design features set forth by Hockett (1960a, b; Hockett and Ascher 1964; cf. Altmann 1967), such as semanticity, productiveness, and displacement, which can transmit indicative, locative, and appraisive messages about the external environment, along with requests and commands for action on the part of others (cf. De Laguna 1963, Morris 1946, Lancaster 1968, Heiman 1968). Maturana (1970) stresses the connotative rather than the
A shorter version of this aper, without references, was read at the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Diego, Calif., with the title "New light on the gestural origin of language." I thank R. A. and B. Gardner, Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, for opportunities to visit them and their chimpanzee subject Washoe, and David Premack, De art ment of Psycholog , University of California, Santa Barbara, for similar visit with him and hls chimpanzee Sarah. I also thank William Lemmon and Roger Fouts, Department of Psycholo y, University of Oklahoma, Norman, for the chance to visit t%e experimental chimpanzee colony in Norman, which now includes Washoe, and staff members of the Delta Regional Primate Research Center, Covington, Lousiana, where I observed part of the chimpanzee group experiment being carried on there by Emil W. Menzel, Jr. I am also grateful for hospitality provided by the staff of the Japan Monkey Centre, Inuyama, Japan, and to the University of Colorado faculty fellowship program, which facilitated travel in Africa during which visits were made to game reserves in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Nigeria. Language origin theories fall into the following categories: ( a ) interjectional, or P h - p o o h [the idea of giving these theories trivial names began wit Max Muller]; ( 6 ) imitative, onomatopoeic, or bow-wow; (c) imitative of sounds produced when objects are struck, or ding-dong; ( d ) work-chant, or yo-he-ho; ( e ) mouth-gesture, or ta-ta, in which mouth parts imitate the movements of hands, arms, or other body parts; (f) babbleluck, based on acquisition of associations between spontaneous infant babbling sounds and features in the external environment (Carini, [I9701 has recently supported this idea); ( g ) instinctivist, in which language appears at a certain level of human cognitive evolution, and is inborn thereafter; ( h ) conventionalist, in which individuals deliberately agree to create language in order to improve their social life; ( i ) contact, in which language is the natural outcome of man's social, communicative needs; ( j ) divine or miraculous, in which language is a gift of the Creator; (k) chance mutation, in which language IS the outcome of a random biological event; ( I )gestural sign, in which propositional communication was initially by hand and arm movements, with vocal language appearing later. Subtypes of glottogonic theory may combine or refine some of these hypotheses, and there is considerable scope in each for different or even contradictor mterpretations. Some are tautologies or, because they are unlalsifiable or incapable of o erational formulation, are unscientific. Others are plausible, but Pack empirical support.

GORDON W. HEWES is professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he has taught since 1951. Born in 1917, he was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (B.A., 1938; Ph.D., 1947). He has taught at the University of North Dakota ( 1 9 4 6 4 9 ) ,the University of Southern California (1949-51), and the University of Ibadan, Nigerla ( 1 9 6 8 ) and has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Tokyo, Japan (1955-56) and in Lima, Peru ( 1 9 6 1 ) . He has carried out archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of the Sudan ( 1962-63, 1964). His research interests are cultural-historical syntheses, the cross-cultural study of fishing, postural habits, and language-origin theories. Among his publications are "The Ekumene as a Civilizational Multiplier System" (Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 2 5 : 7 3 - I l l ) , "A Conspectus of the World's Cultures in 1500 A.D."(University of Colorado Series in Anthropology 4 : l - 2 2 ) , "World Ethnographies and CultureHistor~cal Syntheses" (American Anthropologist 61:615-30), "Food Transport and the Ori in of Hominid Bipedalism" (American Anthropologist 63:687-$lo), two reports on the work of the University of Colorado Nubian Expedition ( K w h 12:174-87, 14:25-43), and "The Anthropology of Posture" (Scientific American 196: 123-27). The present paper, submitted in final form 5 X I 7 1 , was sent for comment to 50 scholars, of whom the following responded: R. J. Andrew, Louis Carini, Hackeny Choe, R. Allen Gardner, A. Kortlandt, Grover S. Krantz, Glen McBride, Fernando Nottebohm, John Pfeiffer, Duane G. Rumbaugh, Horst D. Steklis and Michael J. Raleigh, Roman Stopa, Akira Suzuki, S. L. Washburn, and Roger W. Wescott. Their comments are printed after the text and are followed by a reply from the author.

denotative aspect of language, noting the importance of orienting interactions among primates, as has Chance (1967). A language need not be vocal nor possess duality of patterning to fulfill these functions. We can agree that human language must have arisen through wholly natural processes, under completely describable environmental conditions, among creatures having less rather than more of the cognitive powers of modern man. Whether language arose only once, and has existed continuously ever since, or not, is not crucial to our argument, although the universals not only of speech, but of the deeper structures of grammar suggest that all existing natural languages have a common origin (Chomsky 1967a, b, 1968; Greenberg 1961, 1968; Sommerfelt 1965). Certain widespread o r universal language features may be the outcome of cultural diffusion rather than of innate human propensities. Unfortunately, many efforts to reconstruct language origins have become deeply enmeshed in epistemological and other philosophical issues pertaining to the functions of language in highly sophisticated recent cultures. The ultimate origins of language must lie far back in time, in connection with the environmental and social pressures on early hominids who were extracting a living by foraging and hunting with simple tools and weapons, and who lived in small social groups not fundamentally different from those of some other primate species now existing. (I agree with Livingstone's [1972] view that protolanguage must have been adaptive, and not a result of random behavior, although I d o not accept his notion that human language arose out of something very similar to bird song.) Language appropriate to such a way of life would not display embedded noun or verb phrases, passives, interrogative transformations, and other complexities found in present-day languages. The fact that recent o r contemporary hunting and gathering peoples possess languages with rich lexicons and complex grammars should warn us against facile extrapolations from their cultures to the conditions of early hominid existence. Unless we reject an evolutionary approach, we must assume that protolanguages were simple and restricted, unlike any spoken natural language. This does not rule out the ~ossibilitvthat. much later on. there was a ~ h a s e of phonetic and grammatical elaboration exceeding that of the average language system now prevalent. Ever since the ban i m ~ o s e d in 1866 bv the Societk de Linguistique de Paris against papers dealing with language origins, many linguists have avoided coming to grips with glottogenesis, or have treated the problem apologetically or reluctantly (Wescott 1967). Unlike the perpetual motion machine, however, language is a fait accompli,and hence a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry, despite the absence of eyewitnesses o r firsthand documents concerning its beginnings. Many other scientific problems, farther removed in time or space, are quite respectable-in astrophysics, geology, or paleontology, for example. On the basis of brain size and evidence of cultural accomplishment, it is reasonable to credit the australopithecine~ with at least the cognitive capacities of existing chimpanzees or gorillas. Some ausL

tralopithecines seem to have hunted or scavenged, made crude stone tools, and even constructed crude shelters or windbreaks surpassing anything so far reported for modern pongids. Although reconstructions of australopithecine ecology and behavior vary widely from the predators sketched by Dart (1949, 1971; cf. Wolberg 1970), it is reasonable to suppose that some australopithecines would have been able to acquire, under similar conditions of training and domesticity, simple sign languages analogous to those inculcated in the chimpanzees Washoe, Sarah, Lucy, et al., as described and discussed by Gardner and Gardner (1969, 197 l ) , Premack (19706, 197l ) , Kellogg (1968), Bronowski and Bellugi (1970), Fouts (n.d. and personal communication), and Brown (1970). It remains to be seen whether chimpanzees who have acquired simple sign languages can learn to use them for communication with other similarly trained chimpanzees, o r can transmit them to their offspring without further human intervention. Study of the first point has already begun with Washoe and two other chim~anzees now at the Universitv of Oklahoma (Fouts, personal communication). It may be objected that these apes now acquiring language could not have done so without the dedicated attention of human mentors. In Washoe's case the acquisition of an elementary form of the American Sign Language for the Deaf (ASL) took about four years, although current work indicates that this Drocess can be considerablv accelerated. For australopithecine~ with chimpanzee-like cognitive powers, without the intervention of human teachers, it might have taken not four vears. but some millions of u years under suitable environmental conditions. If such a language came into being, it would not have closely resembled ASL or any other modern sign language, since these appear to be partly backformations from spoken o r even written language (cf. Stokoe 1960, 1966). The notion, advanced by Chomsky among others, that a language system could have come into existence suddenly, as the result of a "mutation," seems simplistic and hardly more plausible than the idea that language is a gift of the gods (Ploog 1968). The growth rate of protolanguage was probably even slower than the snail-like progress of Paleolithic stone-working skills exhibited in the Oldowan u and Acheulean traditions3 Although the early hominids probably had a vocal call system comparable to those of existing pongids, there is evidence against the view that vocalization was the initial pathway to propositional communication. Primate calls are mainly "emotional" and only meagerly propositional (Goodall 1968; I tani 1963; Marler 1965, 1969; Ploog 1968,1971; Reynolds 1968, n.d.). Bates (1970), summarizing several field studies, notes that some primate vocalizations serve to mark territories or spacing between local groups, but this hardly renders such utterances precisely denotative or propositional. Primate vocalizations are not under close voluntary control or inhibition, but are trigIn a recent paper (1971b), I deal with this matter at length. Holloway (1969) has also discussed this issue extensively, but within the frameworkof a model which assumes that langua e was vocal from the beginning (cf. Crombie 1971 for a related ekort).

66

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplem ent, 1992

gered by internal or external stimuli, chiefly social; therefore they are quite unlike the manual, manipulative behaviors, which are voluntary and based on higher-level cognitive analyses of situations primarily apprehended visually. Most primate calls d o not appear to be signals directed toward others, but are broadcast, like human screams, shrieks, or groans, whether others are Dresent o r not. Recent e x ~ e r i ments show that natural calls can be electrically elicited in monkeys, but not from the cortical areas which correspond to the "speech areas" of the human brain (Jurgens 1969, Jurgens, Maurus, Ploog, and Winter 1967, Robinson 1967). Operant conditioning of vocal responses has been achieved in some monkeys, but with difficulty (Myers, Horel, and Pennypacker 1965). On the other hand. stimulation of the human cortex in the parietal lobe areas associated with speech yields no recognizable words (M. Critchley 1966, Brain 1961). Geschwind and others have shown that human language perception, decoding, and production depend on linkages between auditory input areas, the limbic region, and the "motor speech centers," in the dominant (usually left) hemisphere (Geschwind 1964, 1967, 19706; Lenneberg 1967a; Orr and Cappannari 1964). Neither these association areas nor the marked cerebral lateralization involved with language in man appear to have developed in monkeys or anthropoid apes. In the rare cases of lesions on the dominant cerebral hemisphere of deaf-mutes, interference with manual signing and decoding has been reported (M. Critchley 1966). The easy integration of vocal-auditory messages with mainly visual and tactile experience requires cross-modal transfer of learning, a capacity very limited in monkeys (Ettlinger 1967, Ettlinger and Blakemore 1969, Wilson and Shaffer 1963). In anthropoid apes, such cross-modal integration seems to be mostly a matter of visual and haptic (tactile) sensory equivalence (Davenport and Rogers 1970). The evidence to date indicates that the pongids are not much better than monkeys at the cognitive integration of complex acoustic stimuli with visual and tactile information. It is therefore probable that the auditory channel was not cross-modally linked to the visual-haptic channels in the early hominids, even though it is reasonable to credit them with a capacity to acquire a gestural (i.e., visual-tactile) language system. Geschwind ( 1 9 7 0 ~ is ) correct in stating that establishment of cross-modal u equivalence of complex auditory and visual-haptic stimuli must have been a precondition for the emergence of spoken language, but this stricture does not apply to the presumably prior capacity to acquire a gestural language (cf. Hayes 1950). The stock in trade of experimental work with laboratory monkeys has been training them to respond to visual, tactile, and sometimes noise stimuli such as bells or buzzers, by finger and hand manipulations of buttons, levers, and other devices, but their indifference to human vocal commands is well known. There has been almost no success at all in conditioning vocallv differentiated outputs going beyond theukinds bf stimuli which elicit species-specific calls. Early hominids may have found it very difficult to acquire protolanguage depending on controlled vocal production, to say

Hewes:

GESTURAL ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

nothing of language requiring the precise articulations of modern human speech. Until the neural restructurings necessary to establish the cross-modal ties between auditory inputs and the visual and haptic modalities had occurred, their ability to decode complexly modulated vocal messages must have been no better than that of the apes.4 Lieberman and his colleagues suggest that articulate speech is a fairly recent human acquisition (Lieberman and Crelin 1971; cf. Lieberman, Klatt and Wilson 1968), Neanderthal man still lacking the full vocal and articulatory range of modern Homo sapiens (cf. Bunak 1968). Their appraisal is based on studies of physically reconstructed vocal tracts of fossil remains, permitting computer-simulated acoustic replications. Preliminary inspection of casts of H. erectus and australopithecine skull and mouth parts indicates that these hominids were probably incapable of producing human speech sounds (Crelin, personal communication). If these impressions can be verified, we shall have further, and independent, support for the gestural hypothesis. H. erectus made tools to a pattern and in some regions used fire, and these activities are generally held by anthropologists to depend on the possession of a language system. I will argue that a gestural language would have been sufficient for the maintenaice of such artifactual and other cultural traditions (cf. Holloway 1969; Deuel, Rossi, and Holloway 1970; Crombie 1971; Durbin, Watson and Holloway 197 1). Tool-making and fire-keeping may not, in themselves, have depended absolutely upon language, but effective hunting of large mammals, with the ex~anded terrain knowledge which this entails. could u very well have been impossible for a primateturned-hunter without rudimentary language. For a diurnal hunter or scavenger, operating away from the main group containing the females and their young, guided mostly by sight rather than scent, in rough wooded or savanna country, and under heavy pressures to return regularly to a base-camp, exchange of environmental information would be a behavior possessing enormous selective advantages. Kortlandt and Kooij (1963; Kortlandt 1967) have data suggesting that chimpanzees living in more open forests exhibit more roto oh om in id" behavior than those confined to denser forests. Chimpanzees d o exhibit behavior which can be regarded as the substrate for a gestural language. This consists of attention-orientation toward leading individuals, some arm and hand gestures, facial expressions, body postures, and incipient locomotion, any of which may be accompanied by vocalization. We are still far from decoding most of this. Explicit demonstration of chimpanzee capacities for exchange of environmental information has been limited so far to work at the Delta Regional Primate Research Center reported by Menzel (1971), although field studies of wild chimpanzees may be expected to provide
T h e cross-modal transferability of stimuli is a major theme of my treatment of the connection between tool-making, tool-using, and language (19716).

similar data in the near future (cf. Goodall 1968; Izawa and Itani 1966; Kortlandt 1967 and personal communication; Nishida 1970; Sugiyama 1969). Swadesh (1965, 1971) outlined some of the kinds of basic information that a protolanguage might contain. Clark has proposed something of the sort for the African protohominids (1970).5 TrAn DQc T h i o (1966, 1969a, b, 1970) has shown how the beginnings of a language system could have been elaborated from the fundamental fingerpointing gesture, with consciousness of self derived from self-referential pointing. Expansion of signs from pointing in such a way as to direct the attention of another would have gone a long way toward solving the problems of environmental information exchange facing open-country hunting primates. Some have objected that since pack-hunting Carnivora function efficiently without any such language, this argument is weak. The Cape hunting dog,-lycaon pictis, approximates in many ways the reconstructed behavior vattern of the vrotohominids. in that there is collaborative hunting and food-sharing not only with infants, but with other adults. But this animal is splendidly equipped to follow scent-trails and can put forth great bursts of running speed in pursuit of its prey, which it kills and butchers with its teeth and iaws (Kiihme 1967). These attributes. combined with the absence of specialized primate features, have been sufficient to inhibit the emergence of anything closely resembling language among the Canidae, although it is likely that domestic dogs, in particular, surpass nonhuman primates in both their ability to attend to and partially decode human voice signals and their ability to control or inhibit their own vocal responses. Menzel (personal communication) has called attention to an important primate preadaptation for language. Higher animals generally possess a capacity to "read" signals emitted by members of other species; this is as true of prey species as it is of predators, and it goes beyond prey-predator relationships. Man, with highly developed cognitive abilities, should have great skill in decoding signals cross-specifically and great flexibility in learning new codes.6 Chimpanzees and the other pongids, perhaps along with the terrestrial Old World monkeys, should surpass the rest of the Primate Order in turn. Among the higher primates, the ability to "read" signs or gestures, expressions, and postures of others is normally exercised within the immediate social group. With wide-ranging hunting and scavenging, this "reading skill" would be more frequently employed crossspecifically-an expansion of what has been observed among baboons, who take advantage of the more acute olfactory alertness of the flocks of ungulates with whom they associate. The "reading" . peacefully R. L. Garner's pioneer attempts to investigate gorilla a n d chimpanzee "languagen from a steel-barred cage in West Africa and his use of Edison cylinder phonograph recordings in the study of primate vocalizations merit mention. His assumptions now seem nayve, and his account may not always be completely factual (Garner 1900), but his procedures prefi ure, in a way, the approaches of Van Lawick-Goodall, ICortlanJt, Schaller, lzawa, Itani, et al., many decades later. I a m responsible for elaboration of Menzel's ideas from this pomt on.

consists of assessing or predicting the intentions of others by watching head and neck positions, flicking of the ears or tail, general body stance, gait, and other characteristic poses or movements. The modern pongids, and hence almost certainly the early hominids, can d o more than decode such signals: they can imitate them. Ontogenetically and probably phylogenetically, this imitative propensity is particularly exhibited by the young with respect to their elders. The facility or frequency of such imitative behavior among wild pongids is not very well known, but it is the principal basis for the commercial exploitation of captive apes. Recent hunting peoples present dances consisting of remarkably accurate imitations of the movements of animals, and animal mimicry is also employed in narration of hunting exploits. "Animal dances" are a staple of ethnographic dance literature, and some Upper Paleolithic paintings seem to represent such mimicrv. If such animal mimicrv. , , not necessarily in the form of standardized dances, goes farther back in the past, it would have provided a kind of feedback from the motor habits of other svecies which would have formed a gestural or mimed domain of animal "names," a kind of motor onomatopoeia. If, as some early prehistoric sites indicate, osteodontokeratic remnants from hunting or scavenging were available to the early hominids, these could have served as props or costume elements for animal reenactments, in which vocal imitation would have added verisimilitude., vrovided the neural mechanisms for its production were sufficiently evolved. Tool-making and tool- and weapon-using have been often mentioned as glottogonic factors, as noted above (cf. Greenberg 1968). Most comments about the r6le of tools and weapons in hominization have been rather vague about the precise connection with language emergence (but cf. TrAn DQc T h i o 1966, 1969a, b, 1970; Bunak 1968; Leroi-Gourhan 196465; Washburn 1960; Washburn and C. S. Lancaster 1968; Washburn and J. B. Lancaster 1971; Golovin 1961). Generallv it is claimed that transmission of tool-making and tool-using techniques would have had to be based on speech; others have proposed that the sounds emitted while making o r using tools would have led to onomatopoeic symbols for such tools or processes. Holloway (1969) has a long and thoughtful discussion of the language-tool relationship, but his adherence to a vocal-auditory model for early language greatly weakens his argument (cf. Hewes 1971a). Studies of precultural social learning among Japanese macaques demonstrate that fairly complex new tasks related to food-handling have been invented and diffused without vocal language (Kawamura 1963; Kawai 1963, 1965), although Holloway dismisses these innovations as irrelevant to the language-tool problem. The handing down of tool traditions probably depended for a long time not on speech, but on visual observation-i.e., gestural imitation. we still mainly learn how to make or wield Or weapons, except for a few advanced ones and some modern machines, by carefully observing their rnaniexpert. We learn pulation by 'Omeone use axes, play the violin, o r engage in archery not

68

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplement, I 9 9 2

through spoken words, but by guided and imitated performance. I doubt if any important Paleolithic technique depended on vocal language for its transmission, although the full development of spoken language would have facilitated the learning and diffusion of new techniques. Fouts (n.d.) found in his comparison of different methods for inculcating sign language in the chimpanzee Washoe that the most effective procedure was "moulding," in which the learner's hands were positioned and guided through the proper movements. Such "moulding" probably played a significant role in the transmission of more complex tool-making and tool-using skills in Paleolithic times, even if it was not involved in signlanguage learning. Just as the imitation of the characteristic motor behavior of another animal can come to stand as a sign for that animal, the gesture or characteristic motor sequence associated with the making o r use of a tool or weapon can come to serve as a sign for it. Several of the signs in ASL acquired by Washoe were exactly of this kind, and one of the signs (for bib) invented by Washoe also belongs to this class (Gardner and Gardner, personal communication). The domain of tool and weapon names would arise in a gesture language from the distinctive patterns of movement implicated in their manufacture or use. Signs for operations such as pounding, cutting, pulling, twisting, throwing, smoothing or polishing, carrying, etc., are closely analogous. Sensory functions in modern sign languages are usually indicated by simply touching the part of the body involved: eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, the two latter with appropriate facial grimaces. Body functions such as eating, drinking, or sleeping are also readily mimed. The Gardners and Fouts noted that Washoe learned signs which involved touching parts of her own body faster than signs traced in the air, possibly because of the tactile reinforcement from the skin touched. Signs expressing negation, assent, pleasure, pain, disgust, or fear usually involve facial expressions and head movements, and are derived from primitive emotional responses (cf. Darwin 1872). The semantic productivity of various finger, hand, arm, head, and facial gestures, all within the anatomical and intellectual capabilities of the australopithecine~, is impressive, even though we have no way of proving that it was used. Use of fingers in counting seems to be a human universal, in spite of variations in the numbers of fingers (or spaces between them) used as a base. The origin of numbers, obviously digital-gestural, may be relatively recent, in view of the existence of some hunter-gatherers who manage to get by with absolutely minimal numeration systems. The peculiarly human association of righthandedness and left-hemisphere dominance for both language skills and precise manual manipulations could well be the outcome of a long selective pressure for the clear separation of the precision grip from the power grip, combined with manual-gesture language exhibiting a similar (and related) asymmetry. If toolmaking and tool-wielding already had a pronounced dextral bias, one would expect gestures derived from

Hewes:

GESTURAL ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

tool- and weapon-making and wielding to present the same preference for the right hand. Bruner's (1964, 1968) exceptionally clear presentation of relations between reaching, manipulating, holding and working with the hands, cognitive growth, and language behavior in young children has a definite bearing on this matter. I believe that the phenomenon of cerebral lateralization (cf. Lenneberg 1967a for extensive discussion) can best be envisaged as the joint selective product of more precise tool and weapon manipulation, pressures for much greater terrain cognizance, involving right-left consistency with respect to responses to visible landmarks, and the growth of a manual-gesture language; in other words, I think lateralization precedes the development of speech. The manual-gesture language model for glottogenesis has the virtue of following the line of least biological resistance, in that it demands no changes -at least for a very long period-in neural or buccolaryngeal anatomy or function, other than in the direction of greater precision or control. Other glottogonic theories are vulnerable on this point, since the movement from a language-less hominid to a speaking one is much more difficult to understand than the movement from a gesture language, with cerebral lateralization already in being, to a vocal transformation. Jakobson (1964, 1967) has observed that noises, apart from speech sounds, still have a low communicative value, a fact first clearly realized in the era of radio drama with sound effects. I would suggest that the long evolutionary development of hominids as hunters played an important role in preparing man for speech-sound decoding (which is not at all the same thing as the level of acoustic sensitivity o r acuity) by selecting for cross-modal cognitive analysis of a wide range of environmental noises, from the cries and calls of different animal species to the sounds made by snapping twigs or rustling underbrush. Although their hearing acuity is about the same as ours, the modern pongids may pay much less attention to such environmental noises because of the relative isolation of their auditory centers from the visual and tactile association areas of the cortex. Admittedly, the shift from a postulated gestural language system to a vocal one poses tremendous problems, including changes in the ennervation of the lips, tongue, and larynx, and cortical linkages mediating between sounds and stored visual information. Some of these changes have required structural modification of the vocal tract (Lenneberg 1967a, Lieberman 1968, Liberman 1970, DuBrul 1958),perhaps not yet completed at the H. erectus grade, much less among the australopithecines. Fortunately, we may turn to the mouth-gesture hypothesis, first elaborated by Paget (1963 and many previous publications) and Johannesson (1950, also with numerous earlier publications) and first suggested by Wallace (1881, 1895), for a way in which vocal sounds could have come to be systematically linked with elements of a manual-gesture language. These authors believed that lips, mouth, and tongue roughly "imitate"

hand and sometimes other body-part movements, particularly when the latter are engaged in communicative or manipulative activity. This notion is unlike the "bow-wow" or onomatopoeic theory in that the sounds produced by mouth gesture and accompanying vocalization d o not bear any acoustic resemblance to the manual signs o r their external referents (if acoustic similarity were even possible). With the interjectional or "pooh-pooh" theory and the workchant or "yo-he-howtheory it shares only the idea that vocalization may accompany strong emotion or physical exertion. Because of their articulate character, sounds produced in mouth gesture would not closely resemble normal primate calls. Some could be clicks, which are audible without outflow of air from the lungs, and which some linguists claim are archaic (Stopa 1968). Darwin (1872) had observed that precise hand and finger movements were often accompanied by tongue-thrusts and twistings, as when one tries to thread a needle. Sam Weller, in Dickens's Pickwick Papers, moved his tongue when he concentrated on the unfamiliar task of writing. Tool-tongue connections occur not only among human beings who moisten the tips of small tools (such as pens and pencils), but among chimpanzees fishing for termites with saliva-moistened twigs. Tasting and testing objects in the mouth is a characteristic part of human objectmanipulation, most prominent in infancy and childhood, but rarely wholly suppressed in adults, and of course goes back to the hand-feeding pattern of primates in general. Use of the lips, tongue, and teeth continues to play a part in making o r working with artifacts, from retouching flint blades to sewing or affixing stamps to envelopes. Evidence for the neural elaboration of tongue control also comes from the existence of two spectacular genetically based tongue-rolling and tongue-flapping behaviors, which are absent in a significant minority of otherwise normal human beings. The mouth-gesture theorists supported their thesis by amassing "roots" from many unrelated languages, to show that similar semantic items tend to share similar phonetic features, especially consonants; the distinctiveness of consonants, especially initial stops, has been independently verified in recent dichotic hearing experiments. Swadesh (1965, 1971) believed that certain "roots" could be traced back into the Upper Paleolithic. Foster (1969, 1970) is trying to reconstruct semantic phylogeny through similar roots. Cailleux (1953) showed that both glottochronology and the diversity of languages independently suggest an Upper Paleolithic zero-point for the beginning of speech. While all these attempts smack of certain 19th-century philological speculation, I d o not think we should brush them away as totally meaningless. Research in sound symbolism, closely related to the mouth-gesture hypothesis and now chiefly carried on by psycholinguists, supports the notion that there are some semantic-phonetic universals (Sapir 1929; Taylor and Taylor 1962; Holland and Wertheimer 1964; Weiss 1964, 1966). High front vowels are associated with smallness, whereas low or back vowels are indicative of flatness or large size. Sharp, pointed

things are more likely to be associated with t o r k sounds, while soft, smooth things tend to be associated with 1 or m sounds. The conventional test-pair consists of the artificial words takete and maluna, to which people in widely different cultures and language groups respond almost identically. T o be sure, mouth-gesture theory and soundsymbolism research still leave most of the postulated transformation from a gestural to a vocal language unexplained. There are several obvious advantages of speech over manual gesture, including the fact that the vocal-auditory channel is practically a clear channel for communication, whereas the visual channel, as the prime modality for human and all higher primate perception of the external world, is subject to continual interference from nonlanguage sources. Unambiguous decoding of gestural messages requires a fairly neutral background, good illumination, absence of intervening objects (including foliage), relatively short distance between transmitter and receiver, and frontal orientation. Making manual gestures is slower than speaking, requires more energy, and prevents the use of the hands for any other activity while the message is being transmitted; decoding sign-language message is also slower, even among trained deaf persons. Sign-language syntax (cf. Stokoe 1960) tends to be telegraphic, since redundancy is expensive in time and energy. The fact that these limitations on decoding d o not apply to the reading of written language seems to be due to initial reduction of the visually perceived graphic signs to their phonetic equivalents, whereupon they are rapidly processed through the same channels as the features of spoken language (Liberman 1970). Experts in acoustic research, even after many years, find that they cannot "read" the print-outs from sound spectroscopes, which suggests that such records are really quite unlike writing. This suggests that our ability to decode the gesture-like marks of writing may be based on a far more anciently established ability to decode manual signs, coupled with a still greater proficiency at the rapid processing of phonetically encoded messages. Writing speed, on the other hand, since it still is based on sequences of very precise digital or manual movements, is no greater than in gestural sign language. We have assumed that the prime mover for the evolution and elaboration of language has been the general evolution of culture, with its widening world views, more and more complex technology, and increasing intricacies of social behavior. Personal names and some kinship terms could have emerged prior to the development of speech. Tervoort (196 1-68) relates an incident from a school for the deaf, in which a new pupil received her gesture-sign name from her long curls, which one of the other pupils signed almost as soon as she was introduced to the class. Washoe and Sarah exhibited no backwardness in learning and properly using personal names as well as pronouns; at the University of Oklahoma, Fouts has reported (personal communication, 197 1) that Washoe and two other chimpanzees have now learned to use each other's ASL names. In the absence of duality of patterning, the upper

70

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplement, 1992

limits of a manual-sign " lexicon mav have been about the same as the number of signs ,in modern sign languages for the deaf-around 1,500 or 2,000 items, not counting finger-spelled words (cf. Stokoe 1960, 1966; Birdwhistell 1970). Since all known natural spoken languages are richer in vocabulary than this, gesture language may have reached the limits of its capacity to cope with cultural phenomena by the end of the Lower Paleolithic, quite apart from other pressures favoring vocal transformation. Acquisition of a code of 1,000 o r more specific signs imposes a heavy memory burden, even for modern adults, unless such signs can be c o m ~ o s e dof a verv restricted set of " elements (such as phonemes). Mastery of around 1,500 different Chinese characters (kanji) has been considered a reasonable secondarv-school target in Japan, although with the two- and three-character combinations the system permits, along with the syllabic portion of the script (kana), a much larger reading - vocabulary is in fact achieved. Gesture did not wither away, but persisted as a common accompaniment of speech, either as a kinesic paralanguage for conveying nuances, emphasis, or even contradiction of the spoken message (Birdwhistell 1970, Kristeva 1968, La Barre 1964, Hall 1959), or in situations where spoken language fails because of inaudibility in noisy places or, more often, where there is no common tongue. Only the long obsession of linguistics with speech as the only "true form" of language has obscured the significance of the latter kind of conversation. Such messages are usuallv not " very subtle or abstract, and gross misunderstanding may often result, but gestural signs regularly bridge the gap between separate language communities. The literature of exploration and travel is surprisingly full of accounts of how people explained their needs, or exchanged other useful information, without the use of spoken words.' Aside from some work on standardized sign languages, such as those of the Plains. Indians of North America o r the Aborigines of Australia, not a single reference to studies of gestural communication across language boundaries b a s encountered by me in the compilation of over 5,000 titles dealing with language origins, gesture language, and related topics (cf. Hewes 1 9 7 1 ~ )There . has been some study of gesture within particular ethnic or cultural groum. It is conceivable that the continuing effectiveness of nonverbal communication across language and cultural boundaries, sometimes involving separations going back to the late Upper Paleolithic, as in the case of the now extinct Tasmanian natives, may rest not so much on learned behaviors which happen to approximate cultural universals, but upon built-in abilities in to encode its ideas manuallv whenever the our s ~ e c i e s vocal'channel happens to be ineffectivi. Thus we may agree with Lenneberg (and Chomsky) if we modify their dictum that the capacity to acquire language is a species-specific innate feature of mankind, to state
L ,

Hewes: GESTURAL

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

" .

that the ability to acquire spoken language is speciesspecific and innate. It may be that the ability to acquire propositional language based on gesture is not only an older innate character of man, but one which is shared, in rudimentary form at least, with the Pongidae. Manual communication may thus come closer to representing the deep cognitive structure on which not only language but all of our intellectual and technological achievements rest. Finally, we see that gesture did not merely persist as a kind of older. retarded brother of s ~ e e c h .but gained a new lease on life in the Upper Paleolithic and thereafter, with the birth of drawing, painting, and scu1wture:as Leroi-Gourhan (1964-65) and others haveAobseived. Such art forms'can be regarded as "frozen gesture," akin to the air-pictures of sign language, but traced o r formed in durable media. Later, both writing systems and numerical notation arose from pictographs and tally-markings, and the former developed still further into partly or wholly phonetic transcriptions. T h e earliest scripts are mostly sets of little pictures of tools, animals, plants, etc., but it is worth noting that in at least two of them, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese writing in its most ancient form, there are numerous representations of hand and arm gestures, often holding or wielding tools or weapons (cf. Wieger 1964 for Chinese examples). The ancient human ability, derived from still more ancient and general primate capacities, to encode and decode gestures and postures was thus transferred to permanent, nonfading media, with tremendous time-binding implications. The old visual-gestural channel became the referred mode for advanced propositional communication in higher mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences and technology, in the familiar forms of algebraic signs, molecular structure diagrams, flow-charts, maps, symbolic logic, wiring or circuit diagrams, and all the other ways in which we represent complex variables, far beyond the capacity of the linear bursts of speech sounds. The vocal-auditory channel continues to serve the needs of close, interpersonal, face-to-face communication, in song, poetry, drama, religious ritual, or persuasive political discourse. a
-

Abstract
Wallace, Tylor, Wundt, Johannesson, and others have proposed that human language had its basis in hand and arm gestures. The Gardners' work with the chimpanzee Washoe, Premack's study of the chimpanzee Sarah, and continuing experiments along these lines indicate that neural restructuring would
Lack of space prevents me from expanding my remarks on much relevant research in the fields of primate communication, the deaf and the problems of sign language, speech pathology, aphasias, agnosias, and apraxias, brain function, cross-modal transfer of learning experiments, child language acquisition and cognitive growth in children, and psychol~nguistics generally. Citations to much of this literature will be found in my 2,600-item bibliography o n language origins (1971a). At least 2,500 more references have been accumulated since the publication of this work.

I have assembled numerous accounts of the use of gesture language by European explorers from the 15th century onward, principally from the publications of the Hakluyt Society. T h e effectiveness of manual-sign language for basic communication across wide cultural and language barriers is vividly documented in the literature of early voyages and travels.

n o t have b e e n necessary f o r t h e protohominid acquisition of a simple propositional gesture or sign language which d i d n o t involve cross-modal transfer a t a high level f r o m t h e visual t o t h e auditory c h a n n e l or vice versa. Evidence f r o m p r i m a t e studies, early tool-using, t h e continuing functions of gesture in h u m a n communication, lateral d o m i n a n c e in its rela-

tion t o speech a n d tool manipulation, a n d o t h e r sources is presented to s u p p o r t a m o d e l of glottogenesis. I t is a r g u e d that a preexisting gestural language system would have provided a n easier pathway t o vocal language t h a n a direct outgrowth of t h e "emotional" use o f vocalization characteristic of nonh u m a n primates.

Comments

Brighton, England. 1 VI 72 We should not assume as yet that the vocalization system of any recent primate (other than man himself) allows us to reconstruct the vocal abilities of the australopithecines. Comparison with birds shows that high abilities of vocal mimicry can evolve in forms (e.g., mynah, parrot) which are unlikely to be able to approach Washoe's achievements in communication. Indeed, a certain capacity for vocal mimicry is exceedingly widespread amongst small song-birds. It remains possible, therefore, that the human line may have begun to produce and to imitate complex patterns of sound before there was any appearance of either gestural o r vocal language (Andrew 1962, 1963). Any need for the recognition of small groups o r individuals by vocal characteristics would provide selective pressure towards mimicry, to judge from the present evidence from birds. T h e interesting studies of Lieberman and others which are cited by Hewes require some caution in their interpretation. They have convincingly demonstrated that a vocal tract such as that of the rhesus is only capable of producing variations in formant pitch which are relatively far smaller than those involved in the human vowels i, u, and a. Negus (1949) long ago argued that Homo erectus had an upper vocal tract in which the tongue occupied far less vertical space than in sapiens; the conclusion that erectus therefore could not produce as wide a range of vowels as sapiens is reasonable. However, the choice of rhesus and chimpanzee as typical lower primates led Lieberman to some misleading generalizations. Baboons (Papio spp. and Theropithecus) can, and commonly do, produce human-like sounds with a fundamental of uniform deep pitch and a great many well-developed harmonics. Further, such calls include formants of an entirely human type which frequently change pitch because
72

of tongue and lip movements (Andrew 1963). Lieberman argues that neither of these conditions is present in nonhuman primates. T h e fact that they are well developed in baboons (and not in the rhesus, for example) suggests that manipulation of formants which was sufficient to be quite useful in communication could have occurred even in Australopithecus. Hewes's argument for the absolute primacy of a gestural language is somewhat weakened as a result. I have speculated elsewhere (Andrews 1963) on the factors which may tend to lead to the evolution of a baboon-like condition.

justice. The discussion of how symbols become concepts goes far beyond any mere association o r naive connection with the external environment. b y HACKENY CHOE* Seoul, Korea. 1 VI 72 Hewes's paper has strongly reinforced the gestural theory of language origin. His assertion depends chiefly on the results of inculcating simple sign language in chimpanzees described and discussed by Gardner and Gardner (1969, 1970), Premack (19706, 1971), and others and on the hypothesis (based on brain size and the evidence of cultural accomplishment and also on several suggestions from recent research that early hominids were incapable of producing human speech sounds) that the australopithecines had the cognitive capacities of existing chimpanzees and gorillas. It may be acknowledged that gesture o r sign language must have been one kind of primeval communication system among early hominids, because gestures, along with the vocal call, are innate behavior for the early human being. Hewes admits the difficulties of the shift from the gestural language system to a vocal one. T o deal with this "tremendous problem," he has introduced the mouth-gesture theory into his demonstration. One must agree with him, however, that "the mouth-gesture theory and soundsymbolism research still leave most of the postulated transformation from a gestural to a vocal language unexplained." Lastly, Hewes mentions the birth of drawing, painting, and sculpture in the Upper Paleolithic, regarding them as a form of "frozen gesture," but he does not refer to the "song." The early hominids coukd sing "songs," couldn't they? In short, I greatly respect to Hewes's effort and his contribution to research on language origin. I hope, however, that he will add to his theory a more convincing explication of the transformation from gestural to vocal language.

b y LOUIS CARINI* Bennington, Vt., U.S.A.20 VI 72 Hewes's paper is ingenious, but I must wonder ~vhy one would go to the trouble. Every language has a vocabulary of denotative terms, a syntax, and a means of translating one word into another (cf. Langer 1942). Gestures in the natural state d o not fulfill these criteria; in the cultural state, gestural languages do-because they have their origins in a developed, spoken language. Gestures, of course, accompany a spoken language, because as infants we are all of a piece-with movements and noise-making on a par with one another. T h e motoric accompaniment of babbling is stereotyped, and the first few names retain a stereotyped motor accompaniment. With true words, however, the stereotyped movements recede; now we use gestures to fill out the meaning our words are not sufficient to convey. Gesture follows meaning, and words convey denotative meanings better than any other means. When it comes to our primitive needs, however, denotative meanings are not central; so we convey our thirst to a foreigner without any trouble because such basic functions are outside of language. T o label my two postulates for the origins of language babbleluck, defined as "based on acquisition of associations between spontaneous infant babbling sounds and features in the external environment" (p.5), hardly does them
1992

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

VOllume 33, Supplement,

by R. ALLEN GARDNER'ZS words intelligible to an observer who could not hear her. Recently, Hayes Reno, Nev., U.S.A. 8 V I 72 (1968) demonstrated this by playing a This is a welcome contribution to the film of Viki using her spoken words literature on language and communiwithout the sound track. Similarly, cation because it is so explicitly conWashoe accompanied a few of her cerned with the cognitive and proposisigns with characteristic unvocalized tional nature of linguistic behavior. A sounds that made these signs intelcomparative psychologist, however, ligible to an observer who could not should caution anthropologists against see her (Gardner and Gardner 1971). accepting the neo-phrenology of Under these special circumstances, at Geschwind, Lenneberg, and others. least, chimpanzees spontaneously mix The preposterous notion that nonhuauditory and visual media in their man primates cannot associate what communicative behavior. As Hewes they see with what they hear remains emphasizes, mixtures of auditory and unsupported by sound laboratory evivisual media are also characteristic of dence. Some appreciation of the techhuman beings. This primate tendency nical difficulties and the sources of the towards mixed communicative media negative results which have been restrongly supports the thesis of a gesported can be found in Meyer, tural origin of human language. Treichler, and Meyer (1965) and in Fletcher (1965). In this connection, Davenport and Rogers (1970) cannot be cited as eviAmsterdam, The Netherlands. 12 VI 72 dence that the cross-modal associations of anthropoid apes are limited to With increasing sophistication of sight and touch, because their experiscientific knowledge, it sometimes bement was limited to the study of ascomes difficult to see the forest for the sociations between sight and touch in trees. Let me therefore recall one my order to make it bear directly on the earliest and most vivid impressions previous work of Ettlinger, which was from my observations of chimpanzees. limited in the same way. Ettlinger's In the spring of 1960, I began regular data have been cited as evidence of a observation of these apes from two broad lack of associative neurology in blinds, u p to 80 ft. high, in trees that nonhuman primates. What Davenport stood in a papaw plantation on the and Rogers showed was that, with edge of the Congolese rain forest. good laboratory techniques, nonhuFrom these vantage points I could man primates can display a high deobserve the apes when they came out gree of ability to associate what they of the forest to forage in the plantation see with what they feel. T h e lesson is and spend time in the open field. an important one: be wary of negative About 200 yds. away was a hamlet results-they of ten depend more where human children were continuupon lack of skill in the experimenter ally playing; while watching my than upon lack of neurology in the chimps, I could always hear the hulexperimental subject. labaloo of the children. T h e chimp It is admirable of Hewes to choose youngsters played almost exactly the his terms so carefully in the statement, same games as the human ones"Primate calls are mainly 'emotional' running around, doing gymnasand only meagerly propositional." The tics, mock-fighting, playing tag and available evidence which is cited in king-on-the-castle, dangling on low support of this statement refers to branches, etc.-but without a single those acoustic productions of nonhusound. Social intercourse in the chimman primates that are prominent and panzee group was achieved chiefly by repetitious and that are readily observsilent facial expressions, arm and hand able at a distance, hence best described gestures, and bodily postures. From as "calls." When correlated with other time to time, however, some of the gross behavior that can be observed at adults (particularly the males, the a distance, it is true that their proposichildless females, and the ovulating fetional content is meager. T o the extent males) would burst out in a deafening that human beings also emit sounds pandemonium of hoots, screams, and that are prominent and repetitious yells, i.e., the accompaniment of their and that are readily observable at a brief intimidation displays and sexual distance, this statement applies to the riotings. T h e human adults in the calls of human as well as nonhuman village, on the other hand, could primates (cf. Sarles 1969). scarcely ever be heard; much of the With respect to Viki and Washoe, time they were sitting quietly in the the following observations are particushadow, talking, but this was beyond larly pertinent. Hayes noted that Viki the range of my hearing. A similar accompanied each of the spoken type of postural behaviour was shown words in her small repertoire with a by the chimp adults in their moments characteristic gesture that made the of leisure, when they sat and lay to-

gether on the edge of the forest o r in their club bowers, but they "conversed" only by looks and glances, gestures and postures, touching and grooming. Hewes rightly states that we are still far from decoding this gestural language. In this description I have tried to render how an uninitiated scientific observer from a faraway planet would probably perceive the behavioural difference between chimps and man (see also Kortlandt 1960-61, 1962, 1968, and in preparation). He might even go a step further and compare the shortlived but boisterous intimidation displays of the apes with the outbreaks of war and revolution among mankind (David Bygott, unpublished data). It seems highly improbable, however, that he would ever arrive at the idea that human speech has the same evolutionary roots as the types of vocalization produced by humans in sports and games and by chimps in social and sexual riotings. O n the contrary, if he were to study Mediterranean peoples without knowing their languages, he might rather wonder whether the primary biological function of human speech is to add emotional emphasis to gestural language. It will be clear that I agree, by and large, with Hewes's outline of a theory. However, his article is written so concisely that he does not review several major aspects of the problems involved. I would like, therefore, to mention some of these. 1. Why d o chimpanzees not talk? Part of the answer is, of course, that fruit-pickers have less to discuss with one another than cooperative biggame hunters who must engage in sophisticated stalking and ambushing strategies. This, however, is not the whole story. Chimpanzee babies d o engage in a type of behaviour that seems to be homologous with the human baby's babbling, which normally develops into human speech (see Kortlandt 1965 for references). Experts disagree as to whether o r not this chimpanzee "babbling" should be considered homologous with human babbling (Gardner, Hayes, Kellogg, Lemmon, personal communications; Hayes 1952), but this makes no difference to my argument. According to Hayes (1952), chimpanzee babbling fades away when the baby starts to crawl. Since leopards d o hunt and kill chimp babies and youngsters, at least occasionally (Ursula Rahm, personal communication), it seems plausible that selection pressure has produced a special inhibition of babbling in chimp babies at the age when they start crawling around. Under such conditions, of course, speech could never evolve.

With man, the situation is quite different. Humans everywhere show an almost fanatic tendency to exterminate all the large beasts of prey in their environment. Thus we may assume that ever since the development of the spear (i.e., since the Mindel-Riss Interglacial, at least) human children have grown up in relative safety from predators. Domesticated animal species show a marked evolutionary trend toward increased frequency of vocalizations. We may be pretty sure, therefore, that the tendency to babble, prattle, and talk that is so predominant in the spontaneous development of human children can have evolved only after the achievement of sophisticated hunting technologies and strategies, i.e., after the evolution of a fairly elaborate gestural language (see also Kortlandt 1968). 2. Chimpanzees, too, have a system of predator control. Large moving groups of males and females produce from time to time an awe-inspiring performance of vocalization, footstamping, and drumming on tree trunks. Furthermore, at dusk, before going to sleep, they often perform a similar concert. African natives who live in the bush d o much the same at nightfall. Such behaviour is unique among mammals. Wild animals (except birds) are silent as a rule. Exceptions are the sea lions (on coasts and islands where no large predators occur), the hyaenas and wolves (which have no natural predators), to a lesser extent the lions, elephants, and hippos (which have few natural enemies), and a few other species, such as the deer during the rutting season, when they have effective weapons. It is obvious that only the mighty can afford to be noisy. T h e gibbons, howler monkeys, tree hyraxes, flying foxes, etc. are another category of exception, but they find safety in the treetops, almost like birds. Neither man nor the chimpanzee can be classified in this latter category, because even chimpanzees move chiefly on the ground from one tree to another. The tremendous amount of noise produced by a large moving band of chimpanzees therefore requires explanation. Nissen (1931) has described the terrifying effect of this war-dance-like performance upon his native porters. A plausible explanation, therefore, would be that this pandemonium is intended to scare away predators, as well as food competitors. From an evolutionary point of view, however, sabre-rattling will never work in the long run unless an effective last-ditch weapon exists to reinforce it from time to time. Recent work by my coworkers and me has shown that such a weapon does exist.

Tests with both stuffed and living leopards as stimulus objects in semi-wild conditions in captivity, and with an animated stuffed leopard in the wild, have shown that chimpanzees (when in a large group) will fiercely mob and harass such an "enemy." Savannadwelling chimpanzees hit the test model several times with large clubs at speeds up to 60 m.p.h., and eventually decapitated it (Albrecht and Dunnett 1971; Kortlandt 1966, 1967, 1968; van Zon and van Orshoven 1967; and films of the 2d, 3d, 6th, and 7th Netherlands Chimpanzee Expeditions). From this we can conclude that chimpanzees are indeed capable of injuring and putting out of action at least three-quarters-grown young leopards, as well as diseased and handicapped adults. Furthermore, they may beat u p a healthy adult leopard which has caught a half-grown chimpanzee, for it can neither escape nor defend itself effectively with such a prey in its mouth. In other words, the combination of hooting and drumming with armed fighting constitutes a reasonably effective anti-leopard defense system to protect the half-grown, subadult, and adult individuals. This implies that the australopithecines probably sang and drummed, too, but did not speak as long as their defense system was inadequate to protect their children effectively from predators during the age of speech formation (Brain 1970). 3. T h e Gardners generously allowed me to watch Washoe in some experimental sessions at an age when, according to them, she had already "spoken" more than 100 different gestural words. I was very deeply impressed by what I saw. Perhaps the most convincing of all was to watch Washoe "reading" an illustrated magazine. When, for example, a vermouth advertisement appeared, she spontaneously made the gesture for "drink"; when, on the next page, a picture of a tiger appeared, she signed "cat." It was fascinating to see a chimpanzee "thinking aloud" in gestural language, but in perfect silence, and without being rewarded for her performance in such a situation. In my opinion, the Gardners have themselves insufficiently emphasized this aspect of Washoe's behaviour. Admittedly, I disagreed o r had doubts with regard to some aspects of the procedures applied and the interpretations made by the Gardners. I shall not here enter into technical details. One aspect, however, deserves to be mentioned: in situations when Washoe was not rewarded, she tended much more often to "think aloud" in silence than to "talk" to the Gardners and their

assistants. This suggests that these apes have a lot more to think than to say. This inference is fully in line with my conclusions concerning chimpanzee gestural language in the wild (Kortlandt 1968:98, 100, translation mine), i.e., that the chimpanzees "have very little to say to one another" and that "the manipulatory potential of the chimpanzee hand is far from fully exploited in their expressive behaviour."' b y GROVER S. KRANTZ* Pullman, Wash., U.S.A. 13 VI 72 Hewes has given reasons why symbolic communication in a primate species should emphasize gestures. He has also shown why a vocal system would be superior whenever it became established. I would suggest that vocal language may have originated in a northern climate where long winter nights seriously limited gestural communication and favored a substitution. T h e position of classic Neanderthals should be reconsidered in view of Lieberman and Crelin's (1971) analysis of their vocal apparatus. This reconstruction did not include closing the 9 mm gap between the sphenoid and vomer of the La Chapelle specimen; still, their conclusions are apparently valid-that classic Neanderthals, like Homo erectus, did not have the degree of phonetic ability found in modern man. Massive projecting faces and relatively low vaults are among other non-sapiens traits which distinguish these Neanderthals and may also be related to speech. While Neanderthals had modern-sized brains, and probably carried the gesture and call system to its ultimate degree, I still find no good reason not to classify them as late H. erectus. If fully developed language first occurred in the Upper Paleolithic, it may be no coincidence that modern cranial morphology appeared about that time throughout the world. On the other hand, if classic Neanderthals were .to be included in H. sapiens and credited with modern language ability, it would then be difficult to explain why their archaic cranial morphology has all but disappeared. I find it far easier to assume that phonetic language developed in a large-brained late H. erectus population and then spread mainly by cultural diffusion. The anatomical adjustments which facilitate speech were "dass sie einander [gewiss] nur ausserst wenig zu sagen haben. . . . Die manipulatorischen Moglichkeiten der Schimpansenhand werden [also] im Ausdrucksverhalten bei weitem nicht vollstandig ausgenutzt."

74

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplement, 1992

then selected for within all populations, making them sapiens. This would have produced a relatively homogeneous cranial morphology throughout the world without any need to postulate massive genetic replacements. Furthermore, this process would have preserved geographical, o r line, characteristics which had no direct bearing on the speech apparatus. MCBRIDEA b y GLEN St. Lucia, Australia. 14 v~ 72 It seems to me that man has but one communicative system, with the speech component always embedded in a social interaction involving kinesic and paralinguistic behaviour; one presumes that these components did not evolve independently, yet most studies of language evolution ignore this. The primary o r social interaction seems to derive directly from an older system and, like all animal systems of communication, is restricted to "between you and me, here and now." T h e secondary communicative interaction, speech, is subject to no such limitations in space and time. I have suggested (McBride 1968, 1971) that the first such communicative interaction evolved by the linking of a social interaction with the acting out of an event, by means of a play metasignal. T h e message carried in the mime was perhaps of a distant hunting experience, so that in one step, the space and time barriers were broken and a typical human communication occurred. T h e step was huge, but involved only a new combination of existing behaviour. Yet this is still not language. Mime, perhaps soon formalised into dance, is immensely more powerful communication than any found in other animals. There is no need to postulate that man had developed a "need" for language. For natural selection to operate, it is enough that children could learn the skills and dangers of the hunting that they had never seen. If this were so, then the new system had already achieved its special role as carrier of culture. I have postulated a progression from mime through signs to speech, but not as separate o r separable stages. Presumably all operated at all stages, for even today we must rely at times on signs and mime to supplement speech. Throughout the vast period of these changes, the kinesic and paralinguistic context for language also evolved as a complementary system. Language did not replace the older animal system of communication, but added to it. T h e peculiarly animal component has become a treasured human heritage,

adding to words the passion of a lover, the warmth of a friend, and the power of an orator. Of the steps to speech, that to signs marked the transition to a true language, for it required agreement on the units of meaning and their boundaries, as well as the regular use of the same signs by all. This step was probably made by Australopithecus. T h e transition to speech must have been long and slow, because it involved major organic changes in the brain, vocal, and auditory systems. T h e call systems of the primates are of little interest in the evolution of language, since they constitute an ordinary animal system, bound in time and space. Yet reliance on sound presumably gave an early start to the development of our vocal and auditory versatility. Though sign languages are onomatopoeic, the signs represent quite arbitrary features of any referent; each Australian sign language, for example, uses quite different signs for familiar animals. Aborigines find signing faster than speaking and more effective at distances, and some groups consider it more elegant than speech. A deaf Aboriginal grows up with access to every aspect of his culture, and joins freely in any conversation. T h e human facility for mime and its appreciation and our ready grasp of the symbolism in dance, myth, dreams, and art require some explanation. A similar talent is seen in the emergence of natural sign language in every institution for the care of deaf children. These talents would be explicable if speech had evolved through long periods of mime and signing. Natural sign languages are found among the Plains Indians, among all Australian Aborigines, in India, and in many regions around the Mediterranean. They seem to have been studied seriously by only one man, La Mont West, whose conclusions have never been published. He is known to have believed that all of the sign languages had the same syntactic form. If this is so, then it becomes a reasonable evolutionary hypothesis that the deep structure of modern languages is closely related to that of natural sign languages. Perhaps this hypothesis could provide a test of speculations on the evolution of human language. NOTTEBOHMA b y FERNANDO New York, N.Y., U.S.A. 30 v 72 Hewes's suggestion that a gestural system preceded and was necessary to the onset of vocal language is a novel idea unsupported by any compelling evidence.

T h e emergence of vocal learning from an older auditory-independent vocal ontogeny (Nottebohm 19726) receives no serious attention. Yet, to the extent that man, chimpanzees, and perhaps other primates share a predisposition for gestural communication, the acquisition of the typically human pattern of vocal ontogeny would seem to acquire a focal position in the evolution of human language. If this is the major point that a theory on the evolution of language should tackle, then Hewes has missed the mark. Much of the material brought forth by Hewes to boslter his views is of dubious interpretation. I am particularly annoyed by the use made of reconstructions of the vocal tract of Homo erectus. It is inferred that such a vocal tract was "probably incapable of producing human speech sounds." So what? Might we not expect that the sounds available to our ancestral form were different from those of modern man? More important, what does this have to d o with the possibility of vocal learning o r some form of learned language? Thorpe (1967) notes that a linguist presented with the syrinx of a mynah bird would never guess that such a bird could "talk." T h e author also adduces that anthropoid apes are poor at "the cognitive integration of complex acoustic stimuli with visual and tactile information." (No evidence is presented.) From this he argues that the auditory channel was probably not crossmodally linked to the visual-tactile channels in early hominids, which therefore could not indulge in vocal language. By Hewes's criteria, humans may not yet qualify for language. Subjects who have mastered an auditory rhythm discrimination fail to show any transfer when presented with the same rhythm discrimination in a second modality, namely vision (Cole, Chorover, and Ettlinger 1961). Even if extent of cross-modal integration is held as central to language abilities, it is not clear in just what ways man and other mammals differ. Washoe, the Gardners' (1971) hand-reared chimpanzee, was taught to signal "dog" when presented with a picture of this animal; later it spontaneously produced this sign upon hearing a dog barking; presumably at some point it had seen a dog barking and thus the association was formed. Vervet monkeys give different alarm calls when perceiving ground o r aerial predators, and conspecifics react accordingly (Struhsaker 1967). Had vervets learned these vocal signals, we would have here a rudiment of language. Hewes suggests that the correlation between cerebral dominance for

handedness and language could have resulted from tool use leading to gestural communication, in turn leading to vocal language. This is a typical ad hoc "explanation." Even at that, it is not clear what Hewes is trying to explain. Is it that handedness and language coincide on the same hemisphere? This could have happened on a 50% chance basis. Is it the origin of hemispheric dominance for language? If so, he should consider the neural control of bird song. In some songbirds the syrinx includes two similar and independent sound sources, one in each bronchus, each controlled by its ipsilateral hypoglossal innervation. In chaffinches and canaries, the left hypoglossus is dominant, so the majority of vocal elements of song and calls are produced by the left syringed side (Nottebohm 1970, 1971, 1972a, and in preparation). Canaries and chaffinches develop their song by reference to auditory experience. Neural dominance may be associated with complex learned behavior, so that it can evolve in the absence of any concatenation of specifically human events. Other arguments presented as compelling evidence in favor of the author's views are equally waffly. The observation that natural calls cannot be elicited in nonhuman primates from cortical areas homologous to the "speech areas" of the human brain is difficult to interpret. Cortical speech areas in man such as Wernicke's o r Broca's are plotted by noting speech arrest, not speech production, upon electrical stimulation (Penfield and Roberts 1959). This approach has not been reported in other primates, and thus cortical involvement in the vocal behavior of monkeys and apes remains insufficiently studied. On the whole, we have here some original ideas, some undigested facts, and lots of loose argumentation.

by JOHNP F E I F F E R ~ New Hope, Pa., U.S.A. 2 VI 72 I find Hewes's approach attractive for a number of reasons. In the first place, he will have nothing to d o with the notion that language arose suddenly by a kind of evolutionary quantum leap, which actually amounts to assuming a sudden origin for modern man himself. Furthermore, he takes into account the important new findings of the Gardners and Premack and the fact that the linguistic gap between man and chimpanzee is not quite as wide as was once believed. As Hewes is well aware, however, the possibility that man developed a gesture language does not help us to 76 (
CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

get at the most elusive problem of all, namely how spoken language evolved. There is also the problem of the timing of the presumed transition from gesture language to spoken language. Hewes suggests that it might have started toward the end of the Lower Paleolithic, perhaps some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago during Neanderthal times. Certain considerations indicate, however, that if this transition did indeed occur, it may have taken place somewhat earlier. For one thing, the phenomenon of language acquisition argues for more remote origins. Hockett (1968:172) points out that the development of language "is practically impossible to prevent, save through environmental insults so drastic that the child has little chance to survive at all. Its appearance is as inevitable as menarche o r the sprouting of axillary hair, and genetically more stable than either of those. T h e earliest steps, moreover, are remarkably alike for children in all different speech communities." Such observations imply, although they. by no means establish, the existence of speech mechanisms of some sort long before the coming of Homo sapiens, say, among the australopithecines of 2 o r 3 million years ago. Also arguing for remote origins is the observation that nanocephalic dwarfs with brains weighing only some 400 g, about the weight of the chimpanzee brain and less than a third of the weight of the normal human adult brain, are nevertheless linguistically competent (Lenneberg 19676). The organization rather than the size of the brain seems to be the critical factor as far as the capacity for language is concerned, so some form of speech may have existed well before the spectacular expansion of the hominid brain. In other words, speech and the capacity for speech may be so old that we may not need to postulate a gesturelanguage stage in the hominid line. My feeling is that the Sarah and Washoe experiments, and other experiments already under way o r planned, are significant not because of what they imply for gestural origins but because of what they imply about basic communication mechanisms. Peters (1972) puts it as follows: "The evolutionary capacity for syntax may have its roots in much broader aspects of mammalian behavior than has been previously recognized."

premise that evolution of the brain has provided for enhancement of intelligence and allied capabilities, e.g., to achieve efficient cross-modal integration of information, to benefit from observing actions of others, to store in and retrieve from memory both concrete and abstract information, to manifest language, to transmit complex cultural developments to successive generations, to capitalize upon learning/cognition of infancy, etc. Accordingly, it is intriguing to define the relationship between nonhuman primate brain development, as found in the prosimians, New and Old World monkeys, lesser apes, and great apes, and complex-learning and transferof-training skills. Reviews of the literature and reports of recent research on this topic (Rumbaugh 1968, 1970, 1971, 1972), provide empirical evidence in direct support of the conclusion that the relationship, as is commonly assumed in the absence of hard evidence, is indeed a positive and rather orderly one. Brain development, as characterized by extant nonhuman primates when arranged in a graded series that increasingly approximates man (1959), does provide for enhanced learning skills, but more importantly provides for enhanced transfer-of-training skills. The latter effect has been the more dramatic, as evidenced by the fact that in refined, equitable test situations the great apes show profound net gain and the smaller-brained monkeys (notably Cercopithecus talapoin) an equally profound decrement, the gain and loss presumably reflecting differential capacities and mechanisms of transfer-oftraining skills.

by DUANE G. R U M B A U G H ~ Atlanta, Ga., U.S.A. 6 VI 72 The theses argued by Hewes and by Mourant (pp. 30-32) both rest on the

by HORSTD. STEKLIS and MICHAEL J. RALEIGH~ Berkeley, Calif., U.S.A. 20 VI 72 Hewes's paper represents a comprehensive treatment of language evolution in view of recent theoretical and experimental developments. It is impossible to comment adequately on all of the issues raised. However, certain aspects of the relationship of the brain to language deserve special attention. Discussions of glottogenesis are hampered by the problem of arriving at a functional definition of language (Ploog and Melnechuk 1971). Hewes's conception of language is based on design features proposed by Hockett and Altmann. A more functional approach could be based on cognitive substrates (Bronowski and Bellugi 1970). This approach could facilitate elucidation of the relevant neurological substrates (e.g., delay between

Volume 33, Supplement, 1992

stimulus and response, separation of communication from affect). Experiments could then be designed to chart their evolution. Furthermore, Lenneberg (1969) has stressed the predisposition for language acquisition as an integral feature of language. With rigorous reinforcement, chimpanzees can engage in language-like behavior; however, this does not demonstrate a predisposition for language acquisition. We d o not agree that "apes [are] now acquiring language" o r that the gestural language model "demands n o [neural] changes." Rather, selection must have ~ r o d u c e d neural alterations which pre&sposed early hominids to acquire language. Clarification of the relationship between the limbic system and primate communication seems necessary. T h e phylogenetically old cortex on the medial wall of the cerebral hemispheres has strong functional connections with the amygdala, septa1 nuclei, hypothalamus, and midbrain (Nauta 1964). These structures form a functionally related system, the limbic system (MacLean 1970). This system is important in organizing behaviors crucial to individual and species survival: fight, flight, feeding, and sex (Pribram 197 1). As Hewes notes, electrical stimulation of points throughout this limbic circuit by Robinson (1967) and Ploog (1967) elicited the entire vocal repertoires of rhesus and squirrel monkeys respectively. Despite drawbacks in experimental design (e.g., failure to stimulate neocortical areas homologous to human speech areas), these investigations are highly suggestive of limbic control over nonhuman primate vocalization. Naturalistic evidence suggests that additional experiments, preferably on chimpanzees, would confirm this view. While Hewes stresses the neocortical nature of speech, he underestimates the liberation of vocalization from limbic control. Instead Hewes sees the limited ability to cross-modally associate auditory with visual stimuli in monkeys and apes as the primary biological barrier in the evolution of vocal language. This assumption is confusing, however, for the following reasons: (1) Geschwind argued that the ability to make associations between nonlimbic stimuli, not "linkages between auditory input areas, the limbic region, and the 'motor speech centers,' " is essential to language. Geschwind (personal communication) does not view the visual-auditory subclass as essential to speech, but rather as the one most often used in acquiring language. (2) T h e assertion that apes possess limited ability to form nonlimbic auditory-vi-

sual o r tactile associations rests largely on negative evidence. Since monkeys (Gazzaniga 1970) and chimpanzees readily form visual-haptic associations, there is n o a priori reason to suggest an inability to associate other stimuli cross-modally. (3) Lenneberg (1967) notes that "there is no experimental evidence that any associative bonds may be disrupted by discrete cortical lesions" and that "congenitally blind, but otherwise healthy, children acquire a vocabulary with the same ease as seeing children." We suggest that explanations of the origin of human language should emphasize the liberation of nonhuman primate vocal communication from limbic control.

Cracow, Poland. 24 IX 71 Hewes has an enormous knowledge of the subject and presents it in a clear, comprehensible, and suggestive way. He is right in pointing out the deficiencies of other glottogonic theories. In simplifying the problem by reducing the linguistic means, at a given time, to gestures, however, he makes it impossible to explain the transition from gestural to vocal language, for such a transition assumes some coexistence of gestures with sounds. Here Hewes disregards the role of clicks. If we accept three main sources of linguistic means, i.e., physiological symptoms, gesticulation, and onomatopoeia-of which the first two (appearing simultaneously) are to be assumed the oldest-then we come to clicks, where this coexistence of emotionally determined sounds (vowels) and communicative-symbolically organized gestures (click-blocks) takes place. This is a synthesis of the second order; e.g., Bushman /kx'a "hand": /kx'a "to kill," where originally a hand gesture (stretching the hand out) simultaneous with a similar tongue gesture (dental click -/) accompanied the ejective syllable kx'a that in Bushman means "to bite." A synthesis of the first order is already to be found in the chimpanzee, where a vocal expression like kx'a is used in situations in which it may mean "to fight" o r "to bite." This synthesis refers only to ejective o r expiratory proto-consonants o r proto-vowel sounds. T h e chimpanzee's proto-consonants are raw and globular sounds in comparison to the respective consonants of Bushman, which could be described as refined and well-shaped. T h e chimpanzee's proto-vowel sounds are always characterized by tone, stress, and duration (the phonetic analysis of the material given in Yerkes and Learned [I9251 does not supply

any clues as to the use of epiglottal friction). Of course there are n o patterns of tone, stress, o r duration yet; but a phonetician can bring order here, so that they can be roughly compared with similar suprasegmentals in Bushman. Thus some similar function of tone has been found, and even the colour of the mid a(e) and back o(u) seems to correspond in meaning to that in Bushman (there is no front .i series in chimpanzee speech). All these proto-vowel sounds are shaped in tone and colour by physiology (Stopa 1972), that is, they are physiological symptoms of the chimpanzee experiencing some emotion-loaded situation. Linguistically, they have only an expressive function, as is shown when they are used alone, without any consonant. In contrast, the first component of the syllable kx'a (or ka) in the chimpanzee's speech has a communicative function besides the expressive one: this kx'or k calls for attention o r help, as is shown when we compare words beginning with such sounds as a group with groups of other sounds with different meanings o r functions. However, neither the ejective guttural consonants kx'and k nor the expiratory k(g), x and h among the chimpanzee's vocal expressions can symbolize anything, except in the rare cases of swallowing k, vomiting kx', o r breathing h(x). T h e symbolic function belongs only to gestural clicks, which constitute a second layer of clicking that appears after the gustatory clicks have taken deep root among the linguistic means of the Hominidae. Gustatory clicks themselves are physiologically determined, and only a limited symbolic function inheres in them, as when they point to certain circumstances connected with taste.

by AKIRA SUZUKI* Inuyama, Japan. 18 V I 72 Hewes points out that the communication system has a visual-gestural channel and a vocal-auditory channel and that the visual-gestural channel played a key part in the origin of language. I agree fundamentally with his idea that "the ultimate origins of language must lie far back in time, in connection with the environmental and social pressures on early hominids." Having seen a long list of varieties of gesture in interindividual relations among wild chimpanzees (Goodall 1968), we can fully understand that gesture would play a n important part in communication in the stage of an undeveloped language. Hewes says that primate calls are mainly "emotional" and only meagerly propositional. I think it is indispens-

able for communication, however, that all the individuals involved share the same emotional base. Thus we should not exclude the emotional aspect of the question. Chimpanzees' vocal activities are fully developed as a means of expressing their emotions. Their calls in the forest have impressed me as being in the final stage of development as a means 'of expressing their innate emotions before they come to have full language. I think that emotional behavior and vocal activities constitute a stage of development that immediately precedes gesture communication and the birth of language. In order to resolve the question, I think it is important for us to know more about how the emotional behavior has been intensified, crystallized, and expressed in terms that belong to a higher stage. I have seen several adult male chimpanzees hunt down a young Colobw monkey in cooperation with each other, driving a few monkeys down from a tree and then catching one of them on the ground. We can call this behavior cooperative hunting. The same emotion-the desire to hunt-must have existed at that time among all these male chimpanzees (Suzuki 1971). I hope that the process of evolution of the innate capacity which comprised the basis for the origin of language will be investigated and discussed more deeply.
by S. L. WASHBURN*

Berkeley, Calif., U.S.A. 20 V I 72 The study of the origin of human language continues to be hindered by the lack of a clear statement on precisely what is supposed to have evolved. I shall try to state the issues briefly, on each point contrasting the human situation with that of the nonhuman primates. 1. Function. Human languages may communicate a vast amount of information. Communication in the nonhuman primates gives very little information, almost unbelievably little in comparison with that of man (Lancaster 1968). 2. Sound code. Human communication is made possible by a sound code in which a few short sounds may be combined in a very large number of ways. T h e code accounts for the majority of the design features (duality of patterning, openness, arbitrariness, feedback, rapid fading, etc.). In the nonhuman primates there is no code, and it is very misleading to use the same words to describe code and noncode communication. 3. The brain. Speech is dependent 78

on large areas of new cortex on one side of the brain. T h e brain controls the meanings of arbitrary combinations of the code and the articulatory mechanisms which make the code sounds. The code may symbolize those cognitive events of which man is conscious. Man may learn any language with the greatest of ease because of the structure of the brain. In nonhuman primates the normal sounds may be elicited by stimulation of the primitive anterior forebrain, part of the emotion-controlling limbic system. It is the difference in neurological control that explains why nonhuman primates cannot be taught to speak (use a vocal code). 4. Evolution. T h e evolution of human languages involves the interrelations of speech, brain, and articulatory apparatus over time, and this history is unique to man. Gestures are widespread among primates and other mammals, but in none of these other forms did a code evolve. T h e gesture systems are adequate for only very limited communication, unless taught by human beings who are using a sound code. There is no evidence that gestural communication played a more important part in the evolution of human communication than it does in the natural behavior of the contemporary chimpanzee. 5. Chimpanzees. The brains of man and chimpanzee are basically very similar, and recent experiments have illustrated similarities in cognitive functions. Similarities in the way apes and humans think should come as no surprise because all the basic evolution of the brain took place before speech. The uniqueness of the human brain, and of the sound code communication system which it makes possible, evolved millions of years after the separation of the lineages leading to apes and man.

by ROGER W. W E S C O T T ~ Madison, N.J., U.S.A. 14 VI 72

Since Hewes's and my views on language origins are basically similar, I shall focus here on those few ideas concernink which our views are at least partially divergent. Hewes approvingly cites "Livingstone's view that protolanguage must have been adaptive and not a result of random behavior." But I see no incompatibility between random beginnings and adaptive outcomes. Mutation is almost universally accepted as one of the sources of evolutionary change; and, outside of experimental laboratories, most mutation is random. Moreover, while few mutations prove to be adaptive, those few may eventu-

ally not only survive but transform the population in which they occur. Most ethnolinguists would accept Hewes's assertion that "hunting and gathering peoples possess . . . rich lexicons." If, however, such acceptance implies the further acceptance of Sapir's claim (1921) that there is no correlation between technological complexity and vocabulary size, then consensus would ebb; for both Berlin and Kay (1969) and Swadesh (1971) have recently presented strong arguments for the evolutionary view that lexicons tend to exhibit the same quantitative progress as d o toolkits, poverty in one usually accompanying poverty in the other. "The notion," writes Hewes, "that . . . language . . . could have come into existence suddenly . . . seems simplistic and hardly more plausible than the idea that language is a gift of the gods." One's response to this statement would depend on one's interpretation of such by no means selfdefining terms as "suddenly" and "gods." What is paleontologically sudden may be historically gradual. And a people might perceive as deities anyone from a more advanced transoceanic people (such as Phoenicians in Mexico [Gordon 19711) to a group of extraterrestrial astronauts (Von Daniken 1970). Hewes's term "propositional communication'' is arresting but, again, hardly self-defining. I would guess that it differs from referential communication (which Lancaster [I9681 calls "naming") as the statement "Fire has broken out" differs from the cry "Fire!" An explicit definition by the author, however, would be preferable to any such inference. On the other hand, Hewes's phrase "articulate speech" probably requires replacement rather than definition. Though traditional, it is minimally informative. Its presumed antonym "inarticulate speech" might plausibly be applied to drunken talk. Such talk, in turn, could be held to constitute a mild example of the kind of aphasia which Jakobson (1968) sees as an inverse but revealing recapitulation of speech ontogeny. For the most part, however, speech pathology probably tells us no more about linguistic evolution than the "cyphanthropy" of arthritic Neandertalers tells us about the evolution of hominid bipedalism. If amended to "particulate speech," the phrase might profitably be construed as a synonym for what Hockett (1960a) calls "duality of patterning" and I, following Lamb (1966), prefer to call "stratification." When so used, the term "particulate" refers to the fact that linguistic units (such as sentences)

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplement, 1992

differ from the holophrastic units of a pongid system of calls o r gestures in that they can readily be divided into subunits (such as words). Yet even this usage probably has more disadvantages than advantages; for excessive synonymy burdens the memory without increasing substantive knowledge. Hewes's characterization of writing as gesture-like is wholly acceptable when applied to such pictograms as the Egyptian hieroglyph for "eat," which is a "frozen frame" of a man raising his hand to his mouth (Diringer 1949). And it is substantially acceptable when applied to all scripts, such as ideograms and logograms, which refer to visible objects and events rather than to speech segments. But, when applied to phonographic scripts, such as syllabaries o r the alphabet, it seems to me to be inapplicable-except in those rare cases, such as the letter 0, in which real iconism

Hewes:

GESTURAL ORIGIN O F LANGUAGE

may be involved (in this case, representation of the open and rounded mouth required in producing labial vowels). Hewes may be right in surmising, on the basis of what is known about the use of human sign language by chimpanzees, that personal names, pronouns, and kinship terms are older than speech. In spoken languages, of course, all the anthroponyms that can be etymologized seem to be derivatives of common (non-onomastic) forms. Yet it remains possible that, after the introduction of speech itself but before the introduction of spoken names, gestural names continued to be used. I am inclined to accept Hewes's bold speculation that a proclivity toward

gestural language is innate among hominoids in general and one toward spoken language among hominids in particular. I would narrow it slightly, however, by substituting the precise term "congenital" for the ambiguous term "innate" (unless Hewes prefers to leave open the unlikely possibility that linguistic capacity is partially dependent on intrauterine learning). Moreover, I would prefix the modifier "some" before both "hominoids" and "hominids," for I think it improbable that gibbons can learn human sign language o r that australopithecines either could o r did speak, and I have serious doubts about the linguistic capacities of both orangutans among pongids and pithecanthropians among hominids.

Andrew's suggestion that vocal mimicry arose as a hominid behavior before vocal language is probably a valid one, but I d o not see that this constitutes a strong argument against the theory that gestural language antedates speech. Man is the only primate known to be capable of vocal imitation and, with the possible exception of certain cetaceans, the only mammal given to such mimicry. (A few highly trained performing dogs are reported to be able to imitate some human speech sounds.) Vocal mimicry seems to be an essential part of the ability of human children to acquire speech. It may be that in songbirds, vocal mimicry has arisen as the outcome of social pressures; whatever the causes, the phenomenon is not limited to one species. In contrast, despite the enormous variety of mammalian social structures and the fact that most mammals are able to communicate vocally, only man seems to have developed this ability. I would therefore look to the use of mimicry of animal sounds in hunting (for which we have ethnographic evidence) and even in primitive warfare, where techniques of stalking game are applied to the stalking of other human beings, for its appearance in our species. Andrew, like Nottebohm (see below), is highly skeptical of the work of Lieberman et al. (see also Lieberman, Crelin, and Klatt 1972) on reconstructions of the vocal tracts and vocal pro-

ductivity in fossil human forms and comparisons with newborn humans, adult chimpanzees, and rhesus monkeys. Resolution of these doubts can only come from further tests of the adequacy of the procedures and significance of the results obtained in the Lieberman group's researches and from attempts by other qualified specialists to replicate their studies. Crelin (personal communication, July 27, 1971) reports that the vocal tract of Australopithecus has been reconstructed from cast materials; if this form, which seems to lie in the hominid line, was no more able to produce articulate speech sounds than the chimpanzee, I fail to see the relevance of Andrew's remarks about the richer vocal capacity of baboons. T h e baboons are well known to have evolved in a specialized way, above all in the muzzle region, and this should render their vocal tracts highly aberrant within the Primate Order-at least except for some of the long-snouted prosimians. Even if Papao o r Theropithecw should turn out to have the capacity to produce most o r all of the sounds of some human language, such a discovery, however exciting it would be, ought not to affect o u r ideas about hominid evolution o r how ancestors in the human line came to have speech. It does seem, however, in view of Andrew's comment, that Lieberman et al. should examine the vocal tracts of baboons. Carini is unconvinced, along with some linguists, that sign languages can be other than simple back-formations from spoken language. While it is un-

deniable that systems such as the American Sign Language for the deaf and its 18th-century forerunner, developed in France by the Abbi. d e I'Epee, incorporate features derived from speech-and from writing as well-most recent students of signlanguage structure (Stokoe 1960, 1966; Bellugi and Klima 1972) insist that basically sign languages are autonomous language systems. Carini is certainly wrong when he asserts that cross-cultural and cross-linguistic use of "signs" by mariners and explorers sufficed only to express physiological needs such as for food and water. I have collected a number of accounts of sign-language interchanges from the voyage and travel literature of the 16th to 18th centuries, and have found abundant evidence that messages of remarkable complexity were transmitted between people wholly unfamiliar with each other's spoken language. Characteristically, such sign conversations provided information about travel routes, terrain, neighboring tribes (including the local political situation), and trade. Cicourel and Boese (1972) have reopened the question of whether there may be a pancultural "native sign language" capacity in both normal hearing and deaf children. I apologize to Carini, however, for implying that his use of infant babbling in his glottogonic model is no more than the simplistic scheme proposed many years ago by Edward Lee Thorndike, who coined the term "babbleluck." Choe is right in observing that my theory is very weak in accounting for

the transformation of a gestural language into speech, even though I utilized the mouth-gesture theory of Wallace, Paget, and Jbhannesson. There must be much more to the problem than that. T h e notion that man may have developed an ability to imitate animal and other environmental sounds in connection with increased reliance on hunting and scavenging could help to account for an onomatopoeic content. T h e question raised by Choe-whether the early hominids could sing songsproperly belongs in the comments on Livingstone's paper in this issue. I am at a loss for an answer, although my inclination is to say, "Probably not." Gardner's criticism is directed mainly to my emphasis on cross-modal transfer of learning, in which I admit I have simply followed the lead of a number of neurologists such as Ettlinger (1972). I am still impressed, however, with the usefulness of the points raised by the experiments on cross-modal transfer to the construction of my glottogonic model and will not be easily persuaded to abandon this line of argument. Davenport and Roger's study establishes that anthropoid apes d o form cross-modal associations between touch and vision, but visual-auditory ties were not investigated. I would not be surprised if pongids could be shown to have some visual-auditory transfer of learning, but I would be puzzled if after all the experience people have had with anthropoid apes they should turn out to be nearly the equals of human beings in this respect. I contend that pongids have little ability to respond constructively to complex acoustic stimuli, and that they may indeed be inferior to dogs in their capacity to analyze sounds in the vocal range. Gardner's remarks about the conjoint use of vocal and gestural signs by Viki and by Washoe are tantalizing and should stimulate much more observation. Kortlandt's suggestion that among chimpanzees infant babbling must be suppressed as part of the defense against leopard predation could be very important. If babbling in hominid infants could not flourish until adequate protection against leopards could be arranged (through fire as well as effective weapons?), we would have still another argument for the rather late emergence of vocal language, if it does depend to any extent on prolonged babbling behavior. I admire Krantz's willingness to give credit to the old notion that one of the advantages of speech is that it permits communication in darkness, and that the extension of the human range into higher latitudes with long winter
80

nights would have created a pressure for vocally assisted gesture. T h e fact that fire was used in the northern reaches of this range at Choukoutien and Verteszollos is usually interpreted as a cultural response to extreme winter cold, but the dim illumination may have also affected social life by promoting wakefulness during the long winter nights and putting some additional selective pressure on controlled vocalization. In connection with Krantz's idea that speech could have arisen in some Homo erectus population, spreading thereafter by cultural diffusion, it is worth noting that Crelin (personal communication, April 20, 1972) reports having reconstructed the vocal tract of the Steinheim specimen, dated around 300,000 years ago, and found that this form could have produced the whole range of modern speech sounds (which of course is not quite the same as asserting that fully developed spoken language must therefore already have existed). McBride's views of glottogenesis d o not differ sharply from my own, although he gives greate'r emphasis to mime. I agree that dramatic reenactments of hunting exploits may have been important stimulants of hominid cognitive development, and that social reinforcements achieved by such performances may have had a positive selective effect. I am struck by the remark that Australian Aborigines find signing quicker than speech. Expert ASL signers can, in effect, serve as simultaneous interpreters of speech, but there is, I think, some loss of informational content. With respect to West's work, it should be noted that his dissertation (1960) is available at the University of Michigan on microfilm. Nottebohm is the most energetic dissenter from the glottogonic hypothesis I have presented. Like Andrew, he objects to my use of the vocal tract reconstructions offered by Lieberman et al. Even if fossil hominids australof a particular grade-e.g., opithecines-could be shown to have lacked the ability to produce any of the articulatory distinctions found in modern spoken languages, Nottebohm would have us simply assume that some other kinds of speech sounds must have served as the basis of early hominid spoken language. I prefer, until some plausible alternatives are presented, to assume that man did not use the vocal channel for propositional language until he gained the ability to make a set of distinctive vowels and consonants more o r less comparable to those which characterize all known spoken language systems. Stopa (see below) deals with one set of possible exceptions-the clicks, which may repI992

resent a partial alternative. It is true that I did not address myself to the question of either the phylogeny o r the onotogeny of primate vocal behavior (cf. Rowel1 1962, Rowel1 and Hinde 1962, Struhsaker 1967), principally because I believe the evidence indicates that in nonhuman primates vocal calls have very little if any propositional content, aside from such minor examples as the differential alarm calls of vervet monkeys. I was aware that electrical stimulation of Wernicke's o r Broca's areas does not produce human speech, but either arrests o r distorts it. Obviously no one can reasonably hope to demonstrate a similar effect in apes o r monkeys in the corresponding cortical areas, since apes and monkeys d o not speak. T h e data on the cortical localization of vocal controls in monkeys so far tested further emphasize the separateness, at the cortical level, of man's control of the voice for spoken language, even though the same peripheral organs are employed in vocal production and the same peripheral receptors (the ears) in registering the messages in the auditory mode. Nottebohm implies that I have responded to the Washoe and Sarah studies by concocting a "novel idea" about the priority of gestural over vocal language. I thought I had made it plain that this theory is a very old one, discussed in detail in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that the Gardners and Premack have contributed to it important and exciting new data (cf. Peters 1972). I am chided for relying on the so far negative evidence as to the abilities of apes to "cognitively integrate complex acoustic stimuli." I am surprised that Nottebohm, who is involved in some excellent studies of bird song, does not distinguish here between responsiveness to simple and to complex acoustic stimuli. Washoe's identification of distant barking with dog I take to be a case of fairly simple and straightforward linkage of data from two sensory channels, just as exposure to ringing bells and barking dogs would enable most hearing higher animals to achieve consistency in responses to such physically distinctive sounds and their visually distinctive sources. If such animals totally lacked mechanisms enabling them to "integrate" such simple experiences, there would seem to have been no evolutionary need for a central nervous system. But the human ability to analyze speech sounds is quite different from the ability to distinguish globally between a jumble of human speech sounds and the barking of a dog o r the ringing of a bell (Mattingly 1972). On the possible uses of negative

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplement,

evidence, since the case has a special appropriateness, may I remind Nottebohm of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that did not bark in the night? T h e 1961 paper by Cole, Chorover, and Ettlinger did show that human subjects were not transferring rhythmic discriminations from a sound source to a rhythmically flickering light source. Flickering light, however, has been found less effective as a way of presenting visual rhythms than, for example, the oscilloscope, which provides a sharp, moving line of light. Cardiologists exhibit competent crossmodal transfer when they compare the thumping sounds of the heart as heard in a stethoscope to the zigzag line of an electrocardiogram print-out. Ettlinger's (1972) review of work on cross-modal transfer in the past dozen years should clear up this problem, and incidentally indicates that he views man's cross-modal powers as critical in understanding man's capacity for vocal language. Finally, I cannot understand Nottebohm's objection to my use of the idea that the emergence of precise tool manipulation and tool-making might be tied in with language and with left cerebral hemispheric lateralization of these functions in the overwhelming majority of normal human subjects. I find it almost unthinkable that this all happened on a "50% chance basis," whatever may have been the case with the lateralization of song control which Nottebohm has been so productively studying in passerine birds. Pfeiffer, like Hinde, favors the possibility that hominid vocal language is very old, early enough to preclude the possibility of the development of a gestural protolanguage out of which speech later emerged (cf. Hill 1972). Hockett's observation that vocal language is aImost impossible to suppress in modern man does not in itseif seem to me to be a very reliable index to its antiquity. The evolutionary expansion of the hominid brain has been very rapid, paleontologically speaking, and I d o not think we have any way to test for the antiquity of any behavioral pattern by measuring its "irrepressibility" in a particular species. The language abilities of nanocephalic dwarfs to which Lenneberg (1967) drew attention d o not strengthen the argument for the great antiquity of spoken language either. It is my impression that nanocephalic dwarfs present most of the species-specific characters of modern Homo sapiens s a p i a s and could in no way be confused with H. erectus or other earlier hominids in spite of their miniaturization. Yet the cranial and dental features which are distinctively modern

are not, on the basis of fossil evidence, older than 50,000 years. Rumbaugh agrees that the pongids are superior in cognitive powers to Old and New World monkeys; this is a long-standing assumption for which he and others can now provide more solid experimental evidence. He also suggests that the kind of language ability demonstrated by Washoe and Sarah may not extend below the pongids-a point also made by Wescott. However, this must still be tested. Steklis and Raleigh make the useful point that man has a greater predisposition to acquire language than d o the pongids, and that this is something to be conceptually separated from ability to handle language once acquired. I would suppose they would agree with me that man seems to be superior in both behaviors. As many recent studies have shown, normal hearing children pick up spoken language without much need for adult training (Bellugi and Klima 1972) provided that they can listen to normal speech, speak, and be spoken to. Efforts to enhance the speech acquisition of young children, often engaged in by educated, middle-class parents in our society, seem to be largely superfluous. (This is not to deny the demonstrable effect on older children of normative language training in respect to style, vocabulary, and literary-standard syntax.) With chimpanzees, much more active human adult intervention seems to be required to inculcate rather simple language behavior, and then only in nonvocal modes. However, I would disagree with Steklis and Raleigh when they refer to Washoe's training in language as one of "rigorous reinforcement." T h e Gardners did not employ rigorous reinforcement with Washoe, nor is this method being employed by Roger Fouts in his sign-language training program for chimpanzees at the University of Oklahoma. "Rigorous reinforcement" usually means the provision of a food reward for each successful performance on a uniform training schedule. With some chimpanzee subjects, the kind of social reinforcement involved in friendly parental interaction with childrenpatting on the back, encouraging facial expressions, and encouraging noises -appears to suffice. Steklis and Raleigh also note that my statements about pongid cross-modal transfer capacities rest on negative evidence, but d o not castigate me for this. Their concise summation of glottogenesis-that the emergence of human language must have entaiIed the release of primate vocal communication from limbic control-is admirable, although it still leaves us with

the tremendous task of identifying the factors which achieved this release. Stopa's comments relate to African click languages best known in Bushman and Hottentot. T h e idea that the curious geographic distribution of these aberrant speech sounds, along with other factors, may represent the survival of a very archaic spoken language stratum is not new (W. H. I. Bleek thought of this as early as 1868), but Stopa has been the most.devoted student of the click problem. Any suggestion that one language family (e.g., Khoisan) could exhibit a set of peculiar, "archaic features" raises vigorous opposition from many linguists and others, just as the suggestion that certain morphological features found in isolated populations present an archaic character is likely to be met with accusations of racism. Perhaps if the Bushman culture had involved pyramid-building, metallurgy, and writing, instead of a seeming survival of an almost Mesolithic way of life, we would not look at their clicks in just the same way. In view of the importance of these highly unusual sounds, which occur in other parts of the world as nonphonemic interjections o r to communicate with domestic animals, anyone seeking to reconstruct the speech parameters of early man should include click material. It would also be worthwhile to include Khoisan-type clicks in dichotic hearing studies of differential responses to speech and other sounds. Suzuki's field observations of chimpanzees engaged in hunting down Colobus monkeys should be compared with the cooperative ladder-scaling exploits reported by Emil Menzel, Jr. for a small group of chimpanzees held in a large outdoor fenced enclosure. In both kinds of behavior, we must d o more than talk about a common emotional desire and look for specific evidence of propositional communication, which of course could be of an extremely simple character. I am pleased that someone well acquainted with the behavior of chimpanzees under natural forest conditions feels that these animals may be right at the stage which preceded the emergence of a gestural language in the hominids. Washburn's short and cautious statement is unexceptionable until he says categorically that "there is no evidence that gestural communication played a more important part in the evolution of human communication than it does in the natural behavior of the contemporary chimpanzee." I must demur, since I think I have presented some evidence-not compelling enough to impress Washburn, but still more than speculation. T h e

Washoe experiment is evidence; the vocal tract reconstructions of Lieberm a n e t al. a r e evidence; t h e p a n h u m a n occurrence of manual signing, the coincidence of lateralization o n the same hemisphere f o r language a n d the m o r e precise aspects of tool manipulation, a n d so o n , a r e evidence. Wescott a n d I agree o n most of t h e points in my paper, as h e says. I also a g r e e with him that syntax may exhibit a greater correlation with technological a n d o t h e r forms of cultural complexity than most linguists a r e willing t o admit. Granting the disabilities of chimpanzees with respect to production of e m b e d d e d sentences o r subordinate clauses, is it really correct t o assume that such constructions a p p e a r with equal frequency in all the m o d e r n spoken languages of the world? Is it

m o r e than a supposition that embedd e d o r nested sentence constructions constitute a h u m a n language universal? I suspect that f o r a great many of t h e lesser-known languages a r o u n d the world we have n o m o r e than incomplete word lists a n d that in some e m b e d d e d constructions a r e rare. Wescott's proposed replacement of "articulate" by "particulate" probably comes too late, a n d it could be that we need both terms, with "articulate" having t o d o strictly with a n aspect of phonology a n d "particulate," as h e recommends, having t o d o with any code with stratification. My contention that not only obviously pictorial scripts, but all writing, is gesture-like (which I borrow f r o m Leroi-Gourhan [ 1964-651, a m o n g others) has to d o with the motor performas the basis of primate rank orders. Man, n.s., 2:503-18. CHOMSKY, N. 1967a. "The formal nature of language," in Biological foundations of language, by Eric Lenneberg, pp. 397-442. New York: John Wiley. . 1967b. "The general roperties of language," in Proceedings o(the Princeton Conference on brain mechanzsms and language. Edited by F. L. Darley. New York: Grune and Stratton. . 1968. Language and the mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. CICOUREL, AARON V., and ROBERT J. BOESE. 1972. Sign language acquisition and the teaching of deaf children. 11. American Annals of the Deaf 117:403-11. CLARK, J. DESMOND. 1970. The prehistory of Africa. London: Thames and Hudson. CLARK, W. E. LE GROS.1959. History o the primates: A n introduction to the st y of fosrzl man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [DMR*] COLE,M., S. L. CHOROVER, and G. ETTLINGER. 1961. Cross-modal transfer in man. Nature 191:1225-26. [FN*] CONDILLAC, ETIENNE BONNOT DE, L'ABBB. 1746 (1947). "Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, ouvrage ou l'on reduit a un seul principe tout ce concerne l'entendement," in Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac. Paris: Georges LeRoy. CRITCHLEY, E. 1967. S eech origins and development. SpringfielB C. C. Thomas. CRITCHLEY, 1966. The parietal MCDONALD. lobes. New York, London: Hafner. DONALD CROMBIE, L. 1971. The group system of man and paedomorphosis. C U R RENT ANTHROPOLOGY 12: 147-69. DART,RAYMOND A. 1949. The predatory im~lemental technioue of Australo.bithec&. American ~ o u r n h of Physical ~ n i h r o pology, n.s., 7: 1-38. . 1971. On the osteodontokeratic culture of the Australopithecinae. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 12:233-36. DARWIN, CHARLES. 1872. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: J. Murray. DAVENPORT, K., and CHARLES RICHARD M. ROGERS. 1970. Intermodal equivalence of stimuli in apes. Science 168:279-80. DE LACUNA, GRACE ANDRUS. 1963. Speech, its function and development. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1st edltion, 1927.) DEUEL, THORNE, INO ROSSI,and RALPH JR. 1970. On culture as a HOLLOWAY, human domain. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

ance involved r a t h e r than the particular content. Gestures need not be representational, o r may have long since lost their original identifiable pictorial character; the letter A in o u r alphabet is evidently a conventionalized pictogram of a n ox-head-a fact that we now know thanks to Middle Eastern archaeology. Wescott raises the question of whether the orangutan shares the language acquisition capacity s o f a r shown in chimpanzees. I can only report that I have heard f r o m two experimenters in this field that their plans f o r f u t u r e research include the possible use of Pongo a n d even Gorilla subjects, as well as m o r e chimpanzees. I n conclusion, I a m pleased that my p a p e r provoked both controversy a n d suggestions f o r f u r t h e r research. 11:482-83. DIAMOND, A. S. 1959. The historv and oripin of language. London: ~ e t h u e h . DIRINGER, 1949. The alphabet. LonDAVID. don: Hutchinson. [RWW*] DUBRUL, E. LLOYD. 1958. Evolution of the American Lecture Sespeech a? aratus. . , rles, Pub lcatlon no 328, Monographs in American Lectures in Anatomy. Springfield: C. C. Thomas. DURBIN, MARSHALL, RICHARD A. WATSON, JR. 1971. More and RALPH HOLLOWAY, on culture as a human domain. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 12:397-403. ETTLINGER, GEORGE. 1967. "Analysis of cross-modal effects and their relationship to langua e," in Brain mechanisms underlyin speecf and language. Edited by C. H. ~ilfkan and F. L. Darley. New York: Grune and Stratton. . 1972. The transfer of information between sense-modalities: A neuropsychological review. New York: Plenum. In press. ETTLINGER, GEORGE, and C. B. BLAKEMORE. 1969. Cross-modal transfer set in the monkey. Neurops chologia 7:41-47. FANO, GIORGIO. 19d2. Saggio sulle origini del linguaggio. Con una storza critica delle dotTorino: Giulio trine glottogoniche. Einaudi. FLETCHER, H. J. 1965. "The delayedresponse problem," in Behavior of nonhuman primates. Edited by A. M. Schrier, H. F. Harlow, and F. Stollnitz. New York: Academic Press. [RAG*] FOSTER, MARY L. 1969. "Ten postulates for primordial language construction.'! Abstracts, Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association, New Orleans. . 1970. "Explorations of semantic phylogeny." Abstracts, Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association, San Diego. F o u ~ sROGER , S. n.d. The use of guidance in reaching si n Idnyu,iye to a chimpanLee. [oun~al ofcornparatwe and I'h)tiologi. cal Psychology; GARDNER, R. ALLEN, and BEATRICE GARDNER. 1969. Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee. Science 165:66472. GARDNER, BEATRICE, and R. ALLEN GARDNER. 197 1. "Two-way communication with an infant chimpanzee," in Behavior of nonhuman primates. Edited by A. Schrier and F. Stollnitz, vol. 4, chap. 3. New York: Academic Press. R. L. 1900. Apes and monkeys, their GARNER, life and language. Boston: Ginn.

References Cited
ALBRECHT, H., and S. C. DUNNETT. 1971. Chimpanzees in western Africa. Miinchen: [AK*l Piper. ALTMANN, STUART A. 1967. Social communication among primates. Chicago: Universitv of Chicago Press. ANDREW, R. . 1962. Evolution of intelligence an vocal mimicking. Science 137:585-89. [RJA*l . 1963. The origin and evolution of the calls and facial expressions of the primates. Behaviour 20: 1-109. [RJA*] BATES. B. C. 1970. Territorial behavior in primates: A review of recent field studies. Primates 11:271-84. BELLUGI, URSULA, and EDWARD S. KLIMA. 1972. The roots of language in the sign talk of the deaf. Psychology Today 6:6C-64,

76

BERLIN, BRENT, and PAUL KAY.1969. Bmic color terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. [RWW*] BIRDWHISTELL, RAYL. 1970. Kinesics and context: Essays on body motion communication. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. BRAIN, C.K. 1970. New finds at the Swartkrans australopithecine slte. Nature 225: 1112-19. BRAIN, W. R. 1961. Speech disorders. London: Butterworth. BRONOWSKI, 1970. LanI., and U. BELLUGI. guage, name, and concept. Science 168:699-73. BROWN, ROGER W. 1970. "The first sentences of child and chim~anzee." in Psvcholinguistics: Selected pipers by ~ o & r Brown. Compiled by Roger W. Brown. New York: Free Press. BRUNER, JEROME S. 1964. The course of cognitive growth. American Psychologist 19:l-15. . 1969. Processes of cognitive growth: Infancy. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univer.sity Press. BUNAK, VIKTORV. 1968. Die Entwicklungsstadien des Denkens und des Sprachvermogens und die Wege ihrer Erforschung. Homo 19(3/4):136-51. CAILLEUX, ANDRE. 1953. L'evolution quantitative du langage. Bulletin, Societe Prehistorique Fran~aise 9-10:505-14. CARINI. LOUIS. 1970. On the origins of ANTHROPOLOGY language. CURRENT 11:165-67. CHANCE, M. R. A. 1967. Attention structure

82

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 33, Supplement, 1992

GAZZANIGA. M. S. 1970. The bisected brain. New ~ o r k : Appleton-Century-Crofts. IHDS, MIRb1 " GESCHWIND, NORMAN. 1 9 6 4 . ' ~ h edevelopment of the brain and the evolution of language. Georgetown University Monograph Series on Language and Lznguistics 17:155-69. - 1967. "The neural basis of language," in Research i n verbal behavior. Edited by Kurt and S. Salzinger, pp. 423-27. New York: Academic Press. . 1968. "Neurological foundations of human language, VIII," in Progress i n learning disabilities, 1. New York: Grune and Stratton. . 1970a. Intermodal equivalence of stimuli in apes. Science 170: 1249. . 1970b. T h e organization of language and the brain. Science 170;94,0-44. GOLOVIN. V. A. 1961. K ~ r o b l e m e vozniknovenha elementov iazyka v antropogeneze. Voprosy Antropologii no. 8: 144-52. GOODALL, JANE.1968. "A preliminary report on expressive movements and communication in the Gombe Stream chimpanzees," in Primates: Studies i n adaptation and variability. Edited by Phyllis Jay. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. GORDON, CYRUS H. 1971. Before Columbus. Philadelphia: Chilton. [RWW*] GRAY, G., and C. WISE. 1959. The bases of speech. New York: Harper and Row. GREENBERG, JOSEPH. 1961. Universals of language. Cambrid e. M I T Press - 1968. Antfkpol&ical linguivtics: A n introduction. New York: Random House. HALL, EDWARD T . 1959. The silent language. Garden City: Doubleday. HAYES, G. 1952. Theapeinourhouse.London: Gollancz. [AK*] . 1968. Spoken and gestural language learning in chimpanzees. Paper read at meeting of Psychonomic Society, November. [RAG*] HAYES,KEITH J. 1950. Vocalization and speech in chimpanzees. American Psychologist 5:275-76. HEIMAN, BARBARA. 1968. "Some biological considerations on the nature of language." Abstracts, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Seattle. HEWES,GORDON W. 1971a. Language origins: A bibliography. Boulder, Colorado. . 19716. "An explicit formulation of the relationship between tool-using, tool-making, and the emergence of language." Abstracts, American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting, New York. HILL,JANEH . 1972. O n the evolutionary foundations of language. American A n thropologist 74:308-17. HOCKETT, CHARLES F. 1960a. T h e origin of speech. Scientific American 203:88-96. . 19606. "Animal sounds a n d communication," in A I B S Symposium Proceedings, no. 7. Edited b W E. Lanyon and W. N. Tavolga. Wasiington, D.C. . 1968. Review of: Current trends i n linguistics; Volume I I I : Theoretical foundations, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok ( T h e Hague: Mouton, 1966). C U R R E N T ANTHROPOLOGY 9: 171-74. [JP*] HOCKETT, CHARLES F., and ROBERT ASCHER.1964. T h e human revolution. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 5: 135-68. HOLLAND, M., and MICHAEL WERTHEIMER. 1964. Some physiognomic aspects of naming, o r maluna and takete revisited. Perceptual and Motor Skills 19: 1 11-17. HOLLOWAY, RALPH L., JR. 1969. Culture, a human domain. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 10:395-412. ITANI, JUNICHIR 1963. ~ . Vocal communica-

tion of the wild Japanese monkey. Primates 4: 11-66. IZAWA, K., and J. ITANI.1966. Chimpanzees in the Kasakati Basin, Tanganyika. (1) Ecolonical studv in the rainv season 1963- 196Y4. Kyoto university ~ f r i i a n Studies 1:73-151. JAKOBSON, ROMAN.1964. O n visual and auditory signs. Phonetica 11:2 16-20. - 1967. "About the relation between visual and auditory signs," in Models for the perception of speech and visual form. Edited by W. Wathen-Dunn, pp. 1-7. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. JAKOBSON, ROMAN.1968. Child langua e, aphasia, and phonological universals. T f e Hague: Mouton. [RWW*] J~HANNESSON, ALEXANDER. 1949. Origin of language: Four essays. Reykjavik; Leiftur. . 1950. T h e gestural origin of language. Nature 166:60-61. J~~RGEN UWE. S, 1969. "Correlations between brain structure and vocalization type elicited in the squirrel monkey." Proceedings of the Second International Coness of Primatology, Atlanta, vol. 2, pp. 8-33. Basel: S. Karger. JURGENS, UWE,M. MAURUS, DETLEV PLOOG, and P. WINTER. 1967. Vocalization in the squirrel monke (Saimiri sciureus) elicited by brain stirnuration. Experimental Brain Research 4: 114-17. KAINZ, FRIEDRICH. 1943-65. Psychologie der Sprache. 5 vols. Stuttgart: F. Enke. KAWAI,MASAO.1963. O n the newly acquired behaviors of the natural troop of Japanese monkeys on Koshima Island. Primates 4: 1 13-1 5. . 1965. Newly-acquired pre-cultural behavior of the natural troo of Japanese monkeys on Koshima 1sfet. Primates 6: 1-30.' SYUNZO. KAWAMURA, 1963. "The process of sub-culture propagation amon Japanese macaques," in Primate socia? behavior. Edited by C. H . Southwick. Princeton: Princeton-Van Nostrand. KELLOGG, WINTHROP N . 1968. Communication and language in the home-raised chimpanzee. Science 162:423-27. KORTLANDT, A. 1960-61. Can lessons from the wild i m ~ r o v e the lot of c a ~ t i v e chimpanzees? ~nternational Zob Yearbook 2:76-80. [AK*] . 1962. Chimpanzees in the wild. Scientific American 206(5):128-38. [AK*] . 1965. O n the essential morpholoaical basis for human culture. C U R R E ~ T ANTHROPOLOGY 6:320-25. [AK*] . 1966. O n tool-use among primates. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 7:215-16. [AKA1 . 1967. "Experimentation with chimpanzees in the wild," in Progress i n pri. Edited by D. Starck, R. %t:f!er, a n d H J. Kohn, pp. 208-24. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer. . 1968. "Handgebrauch, bei freilebenden Schimpansen," in Handgebrauch und Verstandigung bei Affen und Friihmenschen. Edited by B. Rensch. Bern-Stuttgart: Huber. [AK*] KORTLANDT, ADRIAAN, a n d M. $001~. 1963. Protohominid behaviour in primates. Symposium, Zoological Society, London i - n.61-87 - .- - - . . KRISTEVA, J. 1968. Le geste, pratique ou Langages 10:48-64. commun~cation? KWHME, W. 1967. Communal food distribution and division of labour in African dogs. Nature 205:443-44. LA BARRE, WESTON.1964. "Paralinguistics, kinesics, and cultural anthropology," in Approaches to semiotics. Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Janua Linguarum, Series Major 15:191-220. T h e Hague: Mouton.
\ ,

LAMB, SYDNEY M. 1966. A n outline of stratificational grammar. Washington: Georgetown University Press. [RWW*] LANCASTER, JANEB. 1968. "Primate communication systems and the emergence of human l a n g u a r , " in Primates: Studies i n adaptation a n varzabzlzty. Edited by Phyllis Jay. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. LANGER, SUSANNE. 1942. Philosophy i n a new key. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [I.c*] LENNEBERG, ERICH. 1967a. Biological foundations of language. New York: John Wiley. - 19676. T h e biolonical foundations , of language. Hospital ~ G c t i c eDecember, pp. 59-67. [JP*l . 1969. O n explaining language. Scz[HDS, MJR*] ence 164:635-43. ANDRE.1964-65. Le geste LEROI-GOURHAN, et la barole. 2 vols. Paris: Albin Marcel. LIBERMAN, ALVIN.1970. T h e grammars of speech and language. Cognitive Psychology 1:301-23. LIEBERMAN, PHILIP.1968. Primate vocalizations and human linguistic ability. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 44: 1574-84. LIEBERMAN, CRELIN. PHILIP,and EDMUND 1971. O n the speech of Neanderthal Man. Linguistic Inquiry 11:203-22. LIEBERMAN, PHILIP, EDMUND S. CRELIN, and DENNIS H. KLATT.1972. Phonetic ability and related anatomv of the newborn and l and the adult human, ~ e a n h e r t h aMan, chimpanzee. American Anthropologist 74:287-307. LIEBERMAN, PHILIP, DENNISKLATT, and WILLIAM A. WILSON.1969. Vocal tract limitations o n the vowel repertoires of rhesus monkey and other non-human primates. Science 164: 1185-87. LIVINGSTONE, FRANK B. 1972. Dld the australopithecine~ sing? CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 13:OOO-00. MCBRIDE, G. 1968. O n the evolution of human language. Social Science Information 7(5):81-85. [GM*] - 1971. "On the evolution of human language: A postscript," in Essa s i n semiotics/Essais de semiotique. Edited J. Kristeva.2. Rey-Debove, and J ~ m i l e r (Ap. proac es to semiotics, edited by T . A. Sebeok, vol. 4.) T h e Hague: Mouton. [GM*] MACLEAN, P. D. 1970, :'The ,triune brain, emotion, a n d scientific blas," In The Neurosciences: Second Study Program. Edite d by F. 0 . Schmitt et al. New York: Rockefeller University Press. [HDS, MJR*] MARLER, PETER.1965;. "Communication in monkeys and apes, in Primate behavior. Edited by Irven DeVore. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. - 1969. "Vocalizations of wild chimpanzees: An introduction." Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Primatology, Atlanta vol. 1, pp. 94-100. MATTINGLY, IGNATIUS. 1972. Speech cues and sign stimuli: An ethological view of speech perception and the origin of language. American Scientist 60:327-37. MATURANA, HUMBERTO R. 1970. The biology of cognition. Urbana: University of Illinois Biology Computer Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering. MENZEL, EMILW., JR. 1971. Communication about the environment in a group of young chimpanzees. Folia Primatologica. In press. and P. M. MEYER, D. F., F. R. TREICHLER, MEYER. 1965. "Discrete-trial training techniques and stimulus variables," in Behavior o nonhuman rimates. Edited by A. M. Sc rier, H . Harlow, and F.

$1

language in the behavior of monkeys and apes. MS. ROBINSON, BRYAN W. 1967. Vocalization evoked from the forebrain in Macaca mulatta. Physiology and Behavior 2:345-54. ROMANES, GEORGE JOHN. 1888. Mental evolution in man: Origin of human faculty. London: Kegan, Paul. ROSENKRANZ, BERNHARD. 1961. Der Ursprung der Sprache: Ein linguistischanthropologischer Versuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Rossr, EDWARD. 1962. Die Entstehung der Sprache und des menschlichen Geistes. Basel: Emst Reinhardt. ROWELL, T. E. 1962. Agonistic noisesof the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta). Symposium. Zooloeical Societv. London 8:91-96. ROWEL'L,T . I., and R.' A. HINDE.1962. Vocal communication of the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta). Proceedin s of the Zoological Society, London 138:27&94. RUMBAUGH, D. M. 1968. "The learning and sensory skills of the squirrel monkey in phylogenetic perspective," in The squirrel monkey. Edited by L. A. Rosenblum and R. C. Cooper, pp. 255-317. New York: Academic Press. [DMR*] . 1970. "Learning skills of anthropoids," in Primate behavior. Edited by L. A. Rosenblum, pp. 1-70. New York: Academic Press. [DMR*] . 1971. Evidence of qualitative differences in learning among primates. Journal of Comparative Physiological Psy[DMR*] chology 76:250-55. . 1972. The learning skills of great apes. Paper resented at the NATO Advanced ~ t u &Institute on Comparative Biology of Primates, June. [DMR*] ORR.W. F.. and S. C. CAPPANNARI. 1964. SAPIR, EDWARD. 1921. Language. New he emergence of language. American York: Harcourt. [RWW*] . 1929. A study in phonetic symboAnthropologist 66:3 18-24. A. S. 1944. The origin of lism. Journal of Experimental Psychology PAGET, RICHARD 12:225-39. language. Science 99: 14-15. . 1963. Human speech: Some observaSARLES, H. B. 1969. The study of language tions, experiments and conclusions as to the and communication across species. CURnature, origin, purpose and possible im rove RENT ANTHROPOLOGY 10:211-15. [RAG*] men1 of humans eech. London: Routedg; and Kegan Pau? SOMMERFELT, ALF. 1954. The origin of lanPENFIELD, W., and L. ROBERTS. 1959. Speech guage, theories and hypotheses. Journal and brain mechanisms. Princeton: Princeof World History 1:885-902. ton University Press. - 1965. Common bases of human PETERS, CHARLES R. 1972. Evolution of the language. International Social Science Jourcapacity for language: A new start on an nal 17:145-46. old problem. Man, n.s., 7:33-49. STOKOE, WILLIAM C., JR. 1960. Sign lanPLOOG, DETLEV. 1967. "The behavior of guage structure: A n outline of the visual squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) as recommunication systems of the American dea vealed by sociometry, bioacoustics, and Studies in Linguistics, University of Bu brain stimulation," in Social communicafalo, Occasional Papers, no. 8. tion among primates. Edited by S. A. Alt. 1966. Linguistic descri~tion of sign mann. Chicago and London: University ~ n i i e r s i t MOGO~ language. ~ e o ; ~ e t o w n of Chicago Press. [HDS, MJR*] v p h Series on Language and Lznguistics 9:243-50. 1968. Kommunikations-proSTOPA,ROMAN.1968. Kann man eine zesse bie Affen. Homo 19(3/4):151Briicke schlagen zwischen der Kom65. munikation der Primaten und derjeni- 197i. The relevance of natural gen der Urmenschen? Homo 19(3/ stimulus patterns for sensory informa4):129-51. tion processes. Brain Research 31:353-59. . 1972. Structure of Bushman and its PLOOG, DETLEV, and THEODORE traces in Indo-European. Polska Akademia MELNECHUK. 1971. Are apes capable of Nauk, OddziaX w Krakowie, Prace language? Neurosciences Research Pro ess Komisji Orientalistycznej 10. [RS*] [HDS, MJ&] Bulletin 9:599-700. PREMACK, DAVID. 1970a. The education of STRUHSAKER, THOMAS T. 1967. "Auditory Sarah, a chimp. Psychology Today communication among vervet monkeys 4(4):55-58. (Cercopithecus aethiops)," in Social com. 19706. A functional analysis of lanmunication among primates. Edited by guage. Journal of the Experimental Analysis Stuart Altmann. Chicago: University of of Behavior 14:107-25. Chicago Press. . 1971. Language in chimpanzee? SUGIYAMA, YUKIMARU. 1969. Social behavScience 172:808-22. ior of chimpanzees in the Budongo ForK. H. 1971. L a n w g e s of the brain. PRIBRAM, est, Uganda. Primates 10: 197-225. Englewood Cliffs: Prent~ce-Hall. SUZUKI, AKIRA. 1971. Carnivority and can[HDS, MJR*] nibalism observed among forest-living chimpanzees. Journal of the Anthropolo zPETER.1968. Evolution of priREYNOLDS, cal Society of Nippon 79:30-48. [AS%] mate vocal-auditory communication sysSWADESH, MORRIS. 1965. Orlgen y evolutems. American Anthropolo t 70:300-8. cion del lenguaje humano. Anales de An. n.d. Possible preagPtations for tropologia, Mexico 2:6 1-68. . 1971. The origin and diversification of langua e. Edited by Joel Sherzer. Chicago. ildine.

Stollnitz. New York: Academic Press. [RAG*] MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY. 1877. Ancient society. New York: Holt. 1946. Signs, language and MORRIS, CHARLES. behavior. New York: George Braziller. MYERS, S. A,, J. A. HOREL, and H. S. 1965. Operant control of PENNYPACKER. vocal behavior in the monkey Cebus albifrons. Psychonomic Science 3:389-90. NAUTA,W . J. H. 1964. "Some efferent connections of the prefrontal cortex in the monkey," in The rontal granular cortex and behavior. Edited y J. M. Warren and K. Akert. New York and San Francisco: McGraw-Hill. [HDS, MJR*] NEGUS, V. E. 1949. The comparative anatomy and physiolo of the lalynx. New York: Grune and gratton. [RJA*l NISHIDA, TOSHISADA. 1970. Social behavior and relationship among wild chimpanzees of the Mahali Mountains Primates 11:47-87. NISSEN, H. W. 1931. A field study of the chimpanzee. Comparative Psycholo y Monographs 8(1). [AK~I NOTTEBOHM, F. 1970. Ontogeny of bird [FN*l song. Science 167:950-56. - 1971. Neural lateralization of vocal control in a passerine bird. I. Song. Journal of Experimental Zoology 177:229-62. [FN*l - 1972a. Neural lateralization of vocai control in a ~asserine bird. 11. Subsong, calls, and a'theory of vocal learnIng. Journal of Experimental Zoolo 179:25-50. [ F N ~ . 19726. The ori ins of vocal learnT ~ m e r i c a~ na t u m f i s 1 t 06: 116-40.

TAYLOR, INSUP KIM, and M. M. TAYLOR. 1962. Phonetic symbolism in four unrelated Ian uages Canadian Journal of Psychology 78:344-i6. TERVOORT, BERNARD T. 1961-68. Esoteric symbolism in the communication behavior of young deaf children. American Annals of the Deaf 106:436-80, 113: 922-24. THORPE, W. H. 1967. "Animal vocalization and communication," in Brain mechanisms underlying s eech and language. Edited by C. H. Mifiikan and F L. Darley. New York: Grune and Stratton. [FN*l T R ~DCC N THAo. 1966. Le mouvement de I'indication comme forme originaire de la conscience. La Pensee 128:3-24. . 1969a. Du geste de I'index a I'image typique (I). La Pensk 147:5-46. . 19696. La naissance du langage: la phrase fonctionelle. La Pensee 148:711 1 1

t"

. 1970. L'alveole de la dialectique de la connaissance: Introduction a la fonction de la phrase. La Pensee 149:93-106. TYLOR, EDWARD B. 1868. On the origin of language. Fortnightly Review 1:22. . 1871. Przmitive culture. London. (Reissued as The origins of culture. New York: Harper, 1958.) VAN ZON,J. C. J., and J. VAN ORSHOVEN. 1967. Enkele resultaten van de Zesde Nederlandse Chim ansee Expeditie. Vakblad voor Biologen 4y: 161-66. [AK*] VONDANIKEN, ERICH. 1970. Chariots of the gods? New York: Putnam. [RWW*] ALFRED 1881. Review of WALLACE, RUSSEL. Anthropology, by Edward B. Tylor. Nature 24:242-45. . 1895. Expressiveness of speech, or, mouth gesture-as a factor in the origin of Fortnightly Review n.s., language. 64:528-43. WASHBURN. SHERWOOD L. 1960. Tools and human evolution. Scientific American 203:62-75. WASHBURN, SHERWOOD L., and C. S. LANCASTER. 1968. "The evolution of hunting," in Man the hunter, Edited by R. B. Lee and Irven DeVore, pp. . . 293-303. Chicago: Aldine. WASHBURN, SHERWOOD L., and JANEB. LANCASTER. 1971. On evolution and the origin of language. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 12:384-86. WEISS, J . H. 1964. Phonetic symbolism reexamined. Psvcholoeical Bulletin 61:454, " 58. 1966. A study of the ability of ~n~iis h speakers to guess the meanings of non-antonym foreign words. Journal of General Psycholo 74:97-106. WESCOTT, ROGER%. 1967. The evolution of language: Re-opening a closed subject. Studies in Linguistics 19:67-82. WEST,LA MONT,JR. 1960. The sign language, an analysis. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind. WIEGER, L. 1964. Chinese characters: Their origin, etymology, histo classification and significance. New YOI??: Paragon Book Reprints, Dover Publications. WILSON, WILLIAM A., and 0. C. SHAFFER. 1963. Intermodality transfer of specific discriminations in the monkey. Nature 197:107. WOLBERG, DONALD L. 1970. The hypothesized osteodontokeratic culture of the Australopithecinae: A look at the evidence and the opinions. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 11:23-37. WUNDT, WILHELM. 1912. Viilker sychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwick un sgesetze von Sprache, Mythos, und Sitte. 2 voi. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. YERKES, R. M., and B. W. LEARNED. 1925. Chimpanzee intelligence and its vocal expressions. Baltimore. [RS*]

111.