REVIEW of

Michael C. Corballis,
From Hand to Mouth: the origins of language.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp.xii + 257.
(Review in Journal of Linguistics, 39(1))
James R Hurford,
Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit,
Linguistics Department, University of Edinburgh

Michael Corballis is a psychologist with a strong interest in lateralization, handedness,

and the origins of language. In this book, he puts these interests together with a solid
and comprehensive survey of other background material relevant to the origins of
language. The book also pushes Corballis' own specific hypothesis, that human
languages were implemented mainly in manual gestures until about 50,000 years ago,
at which point largely vocal language took over as an invented cultural innovation.
This is an argument about the medium in which linguistic messages were expressed.
Corballis believes that the human capacity for generative syntactic language may
possibly be as old as one million years. The argument is much less about when true
linguistic generativity arose than about the hypothesized relatively recent switch to the
vocal medium.

While conceding that Corballis succeeds in showing that this late switch to vocal
language was possible, it still seems to me to be very unlikely. Corballis claims that
the hominins of 150,000 years ago communicated mainly by manual gestures, but
were (and here he agrees with the dominant view) biologically essentially the same as
modern humans. Thus, they would have had all the potential of modern babies for
acquiring skilled vocal articulation and control of complex phonological systems.
Vocal language comes very naturally to modern humans. What took our ancestors so
long (about 100,000 years!) to `discover' the advantages of vocal language? Corballis
believes that vocal language does have advantages over manual language, and this, he
argues, accounts for the displacement of the earlier waves of Homo sapiens by later
waves of the same species, technologically superior due to possession of the better
medium for language. Corballis' argument is a revamping of a position that used to be
common among archeologists, especially those concentrating on the European Upper
Paleolithic, that truly generative language itself did not emerge until some 45,000
years ago. At least he does not repeat that implausible suggestion. Instead, he has
pushed the beginning of generative language back to around the beginning of Homo
sapiens, which does seem plausible, while idiosyncratically sticking with a much later
switch into the modern preferred vocal medium.
The argument for successive waves of Homo sapiens displacing each other is backed
by DNA dating evidence, from which Corballis strategically chooses to rely on the
shortest estimates of time back to the common ancestor of all non-African humans,
about 50,000 years. But this argument conveniently forgets the African members of
the human race; the common ancestor of all humans probably lived at least 150,000
years ago. The story outside Africa was apparently that the technologically superior
humans with vocal language displaced their still manually communicating cousins
from the gene pool, while back in Africa what must have happened was that the
manually communicating people had the good sense to adopt the ways of the vocalists
without getting outbred by them. Corballis does not pursue this African/non-African
difference, though it seems to me to be pretty important for his case.

Most linguists will be dismayed to see that Corballis has swallowed the arguments of
the long-range reconstructors such as Merritt Ruhlen. Clearly the idea that some pan-
human etymologies can be reconstructed fits in quite well with the claim for a wave of
newly-vocal humans conquering the world starting about 50,000 years ago. But here
Corballis should have checked with a few more linguists. Most opponents of long-
range reconstruction do believe that there may have been one single (spoken) human
language, to which all modern languages could in principle trace some of their roots.
The problem is that too much time has elapsed since this putative mother of all
languages existed, and the routes to the present are in all likelihood totally obscured
by later changes. As linguists like Larry Trask, Don Ringe and Lyle Campbell, to
name but a few, loudly insist, no good answer has yet been given to the charge that
the correspondences noted by the long-range reconstructionists are not above the
chance level. In other words, no effort has been put into rejecting the null hypothesis.
One might have expected a psychologist, above all, to be sensitive to this statistical
problem.

Oddly perhaps, although the book's central argumentative thesis is, I believe, badly
flawed, I still found this a very useful book in many ways. It does a good job of
summarizing the tangled material on the prehistory of our species
from Australopithecus onward, with a lot of very recent research mentioned. And on
the complex situation regarding lateralization and handedness Corballis is in his own
element and a leading authority. As an indication of how fast research in this area is
moving, Enard et al (2002) have now discovered that a gene (FOXP2) which appears
to be involved in articulation, probably underwent a mutation within the last 100,000
years. Hence the final step in the emergence of a fully vocal language may have been
due to a mutation, not to a cultural innovation. Corballis, of course, could not have
known of this while writing his book. I believe most scholars of the origins of
language will now be convinced that manual gestures played an important role in
bootstrapping humans into communication systems capable of referring and of
describing, at first iconically, a range of different actions. I will warmly recommend
this book to my students in a course on the origins and evolution of language, but with
the health warnings mentioned above.

The book is excellently written and structured. It is characterized by a lot of wry

humour, some of which had me spontaneously laughing aloud. Read it -- it's fun; the
factual summaries, apart from the misadventure into Ruhlen-land, are useful, and the
problematic central argument is, one feels, by no means the whole point of the book. I
also liked the novel layout adopted by Princeton University Press, where the footnotes
occupy a narrow small-print column down the outside of the page.

References
Enard, W., M.Przeworski, S.E. Fisher, C.S. Lal, V.Wlebe, T.Kitano, A.Monaco, and
S.Pääbo (2002).
Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language.

SUMMARY

It is often said that speech is what distinguishes us from other animals. But are we all talk? What if language
was bequeathed to us not by word of mouth, but as a hand-me-down?

The notion that language evolved not from animal cries but from manual and facial gestures--that, for most of
human history, actions have spoken louder than words--has been around since Condillac. But never before has
anyone developed a full-fledged theory of how, why, and with what effects language evolved from a gestural
system to the spoken word. Marshaling far-flung evidence from anthropology, animal behavior, neurology,
molecular biology, anatomy, linguistics, and evolutionary psychology, Michael Corballis makes the case that
language developed, with the emergence of Homo sapiens, from primate gestures to a true signed language,
complete with grammar and syntax and at best punctuated with grunts and other vocalizations. While vocal
utterance played an increasingly important complementary role, autonomous speech did not appear until about
50,000 years ago--much later than generally believed.

Bringing in significant new evidence to bolster what has been a minority view, Corballis goes beyond earlier
supporters of a gestural theory by suggesting why speech eventually (but not completely!) supplanted gesture.
He then uses this milestone to account for the artistic explosion and demographic triumph of the particular
group of Homo sapiens from whom we are descended. And he asserts that speech, like written language, was
a cultural invention and not a biological fait accompli.

Writing with wit and eloquence, Corballis makes nimble reference to literature, mythology, natural history,
sports, and contemporary politics as he explains in fascinating detail what we now know about such varied
subjects as early hominid evolution, modern signed languages, and the causes of left-handedness. From Hand
to Mouth will have scholars and laymen alike talking--and sometimes gesturing--for years to come.