Apparently, Humanity May Have Learned to Talk Because We Got Bored Around a Fire
For most of my life, I assumed human language developed for sensible reasons. You know, survival. “Tiger behind you.” “Food over there.” “Stop eating those berries. Kevin ate them yesterday and now Kevin is dead.” That sort of thing. It seems logical. Early humans lived in an unforgiving world filled with predators, starvation, injuries, weather, rival groups and presumably at least one prehistoric idiot who insisted he knew a shortcut. Communication would have been incredibly useful. So naturally, I assumed our ancestors gradually developed increasingly sophisticated language because sophisticated language helped them accomplish increasingly sophisticated survival tasks. Reasonable. Possibly wrong. A fascinating new hypothesis suggests spoken language may have been pushed forward by something much more recognizably human. Sitting around after dinner telling stories. Yes. According to researchers Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St Andrews and Nathaniel J. Dominy of Dartmouth Co...
