First word problems: A new book explores the ancient history of the spoken word

Writing goes back about 5,000 years, but the spoken words is over a million years old. Psychology, biology and archaeology are now piecing its tale together.

They’re among the greatest magic spells we have in the real world: words. (Among the others on our list: hugs, fireworks, Christmas.)

Markings in a cave at Lascaux, France. For aeons before the written word, splotches and scratchings like the ones above were likely used to communicate information. What were the sounds that likely accompanied them? (Hartlepool Museums)

But back to words, how do a few sounds convey the idea of a golden day dying in an orange sunset; or the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog (with all that implies)?

How did we get to the point where we can use these spells to craft riddles, elicit tears, evoke a laugh or a memory? Command an army, or get a team to meet a deadline?

The sad truth is that most of the history of the spoken word is lost.

All we have are tantalising hints: human fossils indicating changes in the brain and vocal tract; archaeological finds ranging from tools to symbols.

Amid new scientific breakthroughs in biology, psychology and linguistics, it is now generally believed that the first word-like sounds were uttered by early-human ancestors, about 6 million years ago. Rudimentary human speech is believed to date back 1.6 million years.

What does the trail look like from there on? Archaeologist Steven Mithen spent four years hunting for answers, and the result is his 2024 book, The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved.

A professor of early prehistory at University of Reading, Mithen’s previous books have explored the evolutions of music, culture and creativity. He had avoided grappling with the history of language, he says, because the trail has been so broken and murky.

“I always thought of language as the most critical mental faculty on which everything else — imagination, religion, science — is based,” Mithen adds. “But for many years, there was just so much we didn’t know. We didn’t even have a good enough chronology.”

By 2020, though, Mithen believed new scientific breakthroughs had unearthed enough to tell a credible story. He convinced his publishers — who had asked him for a history of agriculture — to let him write about the origins of language instead.

“Writing only developed 5,000 years ago,” he points out, “but our evolutionary story begins over six million years ago, when we separated from our common simian ancestors.”

Stone artefacts, skeletal remains and early art contain hints at early spoken language. Such material has since been supplemented by new research into linguistics, anthropology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

‘In many ways, we talked our way out of the Stone Age,’ Mithen says.

In his book, Mithen traces how the earliest clues available relate to changes in brain size, brain structure and vocal tracts. By 2.8 million years ago, evolutionary pressures, as well as a high-calorie diet enabled by the use of tools, led Homo habilis to have a larger brain than its predecessors, with new neural connections forming between the visual, motor, auditory and somatosensory cortices.

This allowed for statistical learning — the ability to track patterns in an environment and use that data to make predictions about it — but also, Mithen says, to the kind of “cortical leakage” that allowed early humans to link objects with related sounds, to form the first words.

Sensory impressions seeped into vocalisation, and so the slithering of snakes, squawks of birds and sharp knocks of stone tools likely birthed descriptor and naming sounds. Anatomical changes in facial muscles and vocal tract suggest greater control over vocalisation and rapid phonetic changes. All of which indicate that these early words caught on.

These changes have been recorded over the space of about a million years.

Grunts to grammar

It’s interesting to think that such “iconic” words live on. Most languages still contain terms that use the sound of a thing to represent the thing itself. Hoot, tinkle and Netflix’s ta-dum are all examples.

For early humans, the simplicity of this pre-language would have been crucial, because it obviated the need for complex learning; words and their meanings could be intuitively grasped.

Over time, as species such as Homo erectus spread around the world (about 1.6 million years ago), new descriptors were created for new phenomena, and vocabulary grew. As the human brain continued to become bigger and more complex, different areas could now specialise in processing certain types of input. This, combined with the need for effective communication in order to survive, likely led to “arbitrary” words that were no longer directly linked to the thing they represented, allowing hominins to “describe the world in generic terms”.

Thus, from proper nouns, common nouns and verbs, humans likely learnt how to communicate knowledge and concepts; evolved rudimentary grammar; and eventually began to tell stories.

There’s an imaginative interlude in Mithen’s book about how sitting around the fire at night, when no practical work could be done, may have inspired the emergence of abstraction and metaphor.

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This gradual, incremental increase in complexity would have given us what Mithen calls “fully modern language” 40,000 years ago, which played a key role in the development of agriculture and civilisation. In many ways, he adds, we “talked our way out of the Stone age.”

In a thrilling set-piece of a final chapter, Mithen pulls these investigative strands together to draw a line from early primate calls to the end of the Stone Age, the dawn of “fully modern language” and our modern-day Tower of Babel, with over 7,000 distinct languages and an uncountable number of dialects (as well as humour and sarcasm, poetry and hate speech).

“There are still some big gaps in the jigsaw puzzle,” he says. “If we could understand which genes contribute to language, that would be a huge advance.” That would allow for a clearer chronology of language.

“There are also lots of things we’re still discovering through archaeology. But I hope I’ve provided a framework for all those [new] bits and pieces to fit into. And I feel confident that the scenario I’ve put forward will remain [robust], even with new discoveries.”

In the present, he adds, we could wield our ability to communicate with a bit more discretion.

“Political leaders today, for instance, are not sufficiently careful with their words. Knowing about the long history of language, the true power it has, should make us appreciate it more,” Mithen says. “For me to think of ideas, translate them into words and convey them to you, that’s amazing. It’s almost a miracle that this can happen.”