Koalas may have a thumb on each "hand" - but can they play the piano.
Some humans have a brain - but rarely use it.

Before we can communicate those complex and abstract ideas, we first need to formulate them in our brains.

Personally, I wouldn't nominate any ONE thing as THE most important. Our human-ness is a combination of many factors. Often language is the last action in a long thought process

Silence can be golden, but as Ronan Keating sings..'" you say it best when you say nothing at all."

Now that's DEEP.

David, you're assuming that speech = language. This is untrue. Many of the languages today are signed, not spoken. Neanderthals may not have been able to speak (I don't know) but they (and H. sapiens) may well have communicated using signed languages, or a combination of speech and signs.

What a Conversation, Amy!

Dani, no, I was being quite specific about words. Syllabic, framed content (Peter MacNeilage The Origin of Speech). Words are building blocks which can be shared, used to discuss things like ethics and genetics, built on and shared again ad infinitum. We are the only animal which can use them. Perhaps Neandertals could use sign (Jean M Auel) or ESP (John Darnton) or gibberish (Conan Doyle). There is evidence of trading and a degree of social organisation which indicates communication between Neandertals. But words are much much better (you don't have to be looking at a person, you can be specific, and they can have a life of their own). But to enunciate clipped salvoes of words there must be an appropriate general anatomy, as well as the appropriate genes and neural connections. I argue the Neandertal head anatomy only enabled them to speak in tongues, which was not good enough in the end. The word was the beginning for us but the beginning of the end for them (I think) even though they'd done pretty well for 400,000 years. Our head anatomy (flat face, poor sense of smell, ability to enunciate) was feasible for survival if our ancestors evolved with ancestral dogs..

You could check out Richard Rudgley (Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age) who argues history is a footnote to prehistory.

Please have a look at my website www.compositeconversationalist.com

Not quite the only species to use signs Dani ... those curious wiggly dances bees do on returning to the hive would seem to fit any working definition of a sign language. And they are apparently a lot brighter than we'd assumed despite their pin head brains. Makes you think don't it?

No Peter, bees' dances would NOT fit ANY definition of a sign language. Signed languages (or sign languages) are really very different from what bees do. For a start, as I explained above, signs - like words - can be moved around in different ways to create an infinite number of utterances. Bees' communicative dances can't do that. Bees' communicative dances don't have grammar.

Bees might be clever examples of insects - I'm not arguing with you there - but they are not using language. Users of signed languages - Deaf people - have had to put up with their languages being denigrated for millennia. Given that we now have the linguistic proof that their languages are - just like English, Hindi and Vietnamese - real, natural languages, with the same levels of complexity as English, Hindi and Vietnamese (just as examples) there's really no excuse for comparing them to bees dancing - it's actually pretty insulting, I think.

Dani, you clearly are very knowledgeable about sign language. I am not. It seems to me that sign language is very sophisticated and the people who convert words into sign at public gatherings are brilliant. The level of communication appears very advanced. I've often thought, why bother to speak, when sign could be a universal language? It would be a lot quieter, for a start. But I think it fair to say that the bulk of us tried to speak from when we were first able to sit up, which suggests that vocalization is the most likely evolutionary track that Homo species took for communication. Many animals vocalize to communicate. If only Homo evolved sign rather than through gradual natural selection of characteristics from other families of animals, it would be miraculous, but not impossible I suppose. Body language to communicate is a different matter for discussion, I think.

Thanks Adam and Dani. Well, I think you're brilliant. My wife has just reminded me that Oliver Sachs in Seeing Voices considered that sign enjoyed much higher respect 100+ years ago as a stand alone means of communication. Simply using it to convert words now has done us all a dis-service. Still, if one accepts that we had a primate past, that life is a dynamic of survival strategies, and that culture has a biological basis (in this case including the FoxP2 gene), then it seems to me parsimonious to think that vocalisation of words (in the company of dogs) has got us where we are now. Mind you, we may not get much further, in which case someone else (an octopus?) will one day conclude that our species chanced on the wrong path in life.

Good on yer, Amy.

You'll need to find common language with the guys that finance the mess. The Money Power.
They only understand profit and conquest. And no matter what is said, pleaded, or submitted they miss it completely.
So the language thesis for human superiority here breaks down. If you want to know who go here; http://www.ted.com/talks/james_b_glattfelder_who_controls_the_world.html and http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995
One interesting thing I've come to recently is the fact that we are quite retarded in our societal organizational behaviour when compared to other social species.
In the Social Insect World, termites bees, etc. have evolved cooperative strategies for the continuance of their civilization or hive. We use competition as our driving force.
In order to have peace we will need to learn the lesson of cooperation from the lowly ant!
Hmmm.. this is a major step as it will confound our pride in the superiority of all things human.. :-)

Great article Amy, thanks!

Interesting question. But I think if our definition of 'language' is too broad, the term can become meaningless.

If we decide 'art' is language, is a bowerbird's bower also a form of language?

*smile*, I haven't misunderstood you Amy, apologies for the mock-indignation rhetorical comment.

There is a core of a point to that comment though: a person who is congenitally mute is still able to think complex/abstract ideas and display uniquely human characteristics, which suggests that there is something other than language that makes us uniquely human (although such a person can still receive communication, even if they don't speak).

You are saying that you wanted to discuss the evolutionary advantage that language has given us, and it is harder for me to debate you there. However, I think that is a modified version of your original idea above, that language is what makes us unique.

As an evolutionary advantage, it is hard to discount language as one of - if not the most - important thing. I still think that the capacity for complex and abstract thoughts rivals language as an important and unique trait that humans have.

I think there is an argument that we could only develop the capacity for complex and abstract thought through virtue of having the capacity for complex and abstract language, and vice versa. The evolutionary development of the two was perhaps interdependent, and they developed concurrently.

Perhaps it was only through communication that we could develop complex and abstrac thoughts.

Did Modern Homo sapiens prevail over Neanderthals on physical characteristics, or because they could adapt faster to change at the end of the most-recent glaciation?

Through talking we develop strategies together and can propagate those strategies rapidly throughout the tribe/community. We can adapt far faster than any other species with our generation interval, including earlier Homo species or varieties.

It is necessary to distinguish cause and effect here. A gene allowing speech is of no consequence without an evolutionary advantage arising from the expression of that gene. Through speaking we gained a strong adaptive advantage and so created a selection pressure favouring the FOXP2 gene.

Your answer is indicating the gap between advances in bioscience and theoretical bottleneck in philosophy of language.
At least the FOXP2 gene issue is no longer a dance floor for Chomsky-Pinker proponents.

Complex behaviours are not usually attributable to single genes.

Even if the gene were demonstrated to contribute to linguistic ability, there is no certainty that the FOXP2 gene confers a selective advantage on its own. It may only have become so when it came to be associated with specific other genes.

The big selective advantage of our languages are in how we use them, not in the specific sounds we make. The probability seems low to me that certain people within the community developed symbolic and abstract languages primarily through their genes.

Human evolution is primarily cultural, rather than genetic. The genes follow, rather than lead.

I suggest that FOXP2 may be a marker for a set of genes that came to be advantaged through our dependence on language and that, in turn, enhanced our linguistic abilities.

Specific mutations are only a little more relevant than the choice of which specific coal we throw on the fire. The advantageous combination might have been made up of a different set of alleles.

That's quite sad Deb. You're suggesting literature, music, cooking and architecture are meaningless. All that matters is that humans sometimes destroy things. We're altogether loathsome.

Yes, I meant "we're getting more proficient" - furthermore I meant that referring to recent history vs more distant history, rather than "we're getting more proficient at it day by day".

Thought so Graham - sad huh? If only there were more Jane Goodalls out there exploring animals and their abilities perhaps we would not be so sanguine about our 'specialness'?

HI

I think the cute and innocent image that animals have is largely a human perception.
Its a dog eat dog world in the animal kingdom.

Watch any David Attenborough documentary and the only language that comes across are the words "what's for dinner".

I guess you could call it "noble savagery", but nothing appears to be safe from being on someone's menu.

Animals do what they do - eat other animals, (well mostly all), but the one's that don't seem to eat other animals, are on our menu.

I always laugh at the situation where a whale or a dolphin is a sacrosanct thing, but a tuna or a sardine is just there for lunch.

Creation myths (in His image), notion of souls, the afterlife... There is certainly an air of arogance in monotheistic belief systems that humanity is somehow superior.

I would like to start a pathogen worshipping cult. They're the real superior race!

Not even sure about this Amy... the bible has been written for a few millenium and it's been transliterated incorrectly in a number of passages.
The ancient traditions placed great value in close attention and repetition of certain passages which could then be passed down through history..
In fact I find it fascinating that so many absolute statements are made by the scientifically trained here, which upon critique need to be amended. Why make statements which sound absolute when the jury is clearly out?
It seems simple to me that signing was a first step in an evolutionary path to spoken language, given your exposition of the thesis that we separated from the Chimpanzee line 4-8 millions of years back. It is then reasonable to assume we developed signing at the same time as the Chimpanzees, and thus had a developed language centre in our brain. The Chimpanzees also have this as they developed signing also.
The difference being we developed ours further along with our vocal capacity. Note we were and have built on a capacity already ancient in our being.

Hi Greg

Chimps did not actually develop signing. they may use gestures - as do other animals such as bees, as has been pointed out - but they certainly didn't sign, as signing = language, and chimps certainly don't have that. It's been suggested that the odd chimp (Nim Chimsky is the most famous) has been taught to sign, but as Adam - who is one of the foremost linguists of signed languages here in Australia - has pointed out, whether that's actually the case is one that is debated amongst linguists ie there's no doubt that Nim - and other primates - have been taught SOME signs, but whether they used them in a language-like way is up for debate. In either case, it's for absolute sure that chimps did not 'develop' signing - language, as Amy's article points out, remains, as far as we're aware, a feature only of humans.

Hi

when a chimp can order "fries with that" at Mc Donalds, then I'll be impressed.

Lets worry about communication between humans around the world - it is a far more pressing issue than talking to the animals.

hi Adam, are you volunteering and save me doing your course?
I'll take a plunge into a field and be speculative...
Language is a field of study separate to its delivery vector.
I imagine the field of linguistics studies the delivery of 'the idea', whence ever the idea might appear, in a language form.
Of course language is a system of recognizable bits which are able to be reassembled according to inherent rules of the language to convey abstract meaning. The language to be effective must be repeatable, teachable and sufficiently mutable to enable alteration and evolution. I expect that deliberate information is imparted.
Any number of languages can convey meaning about a real subject without reference to the other languages. If the languages in this group are all human languages, then I expect that the full range of human ideas and thoughts could be explored in any of the human languages provided the necessary terms are available.
Words can fail to be present when we need or want them. Language is apparent in spoken word forms based in alphabetic glyphs. Mathematics might be recognized here; maths glyphs, symbols and signs are all provided an enunciated sound. Musical language likewise; do, rae, far, etc.
Computer languages...
Various codes and other artificial constructs where communications are made repeatable and deliberate information is imparted.
What else?

Dear Greg and Adam

The difference between Language as a medium of communication and Art and Music is that the latter two have no words. So they do not give rise to dispute. Language always leads to an argument, most of the time a futile one.

But it is all we have so far.