First Words.

by Danbert Nobacon.

Once upon around one or two hundred thousand years ago, for the first time in human history an infant boy looked at his momma and raising his arms above his head said what sounded like “Up!” It may not have been the very first word, but it was one of them. Mother understood the boy implicitly and picked him up. The great leap forward to language with syntax: you (subject) pick (verb) me (direct object) up, would evolve sometime before Homo sapiens left Africa around sixty five thousand years ago. This is a just so evolutionary story, because it just so happens to be true —or I would not be able to write it down, nor you read and understand it— but there remains just so much we do not know of the exact detail of how and when this exchange occurred.

Up is not something a chimpanzee infant can, or would ever actually need to say, not because chimp infants do not want or need to be close to their mothers, but because such constant closeness to mum’s heartbeat is embodied in how chimpanzees have evolved. Chimpanzee babies with opposable big toes as well as their opposable thumbs, by the age of two months have developed the strength to hang on to chimpanzee mum’s chest fur. Even as the mother chimp forages for food her offspring can suckle and stay intimately close, unassisted.

For the infant boy to be able to gesture and vocalize his need and want for maternal warmth, a long string of correct guesses in the evolutionary maze, was required across millions of years. He and mum had at least to be in a place where mother and child could converse in the, by then instinctive, turn-taking babble of motherese. And such unconscious instincts are awakened in us all today as we goo-goo and ga-ga when presented with pre-lingual babies.

Leading up to this momentous exchange, down through a handful of million years our ancestors morphed from tree dwelling apes with brains no larger than those of chimpanzees to you and me and everything we know.

In the beginning, which was not the beginning, but simply a decisive juncture on the evolutionary continuum, a fierce ice age gripped the earth. More moisture was sucked up from the oceans and turned into advancing ice sheets. The consequently drier atmosphere and cooling shrank the African forests forcing do-or-die evolutionary adaptations on many animals and plants. Chimpanzees retreated into the deeper pockets of forest where they still live today. Some of our forbears adapted to living on the fringes in the savannah woodland with its complex maze of sub-habitats, perhaps not least by spending an increasing amount of time on two legs instead of four.

Three million years ago our ancestors still climbed and slept in trees, but gradually, ever so gradually, they began to spend more time on the ground. As they did so their pelvis narrowed, and their leg and feet bones evolved to make walking their main mode of locomotion. Their big toes became more aligned in a front facing direction, like our own, much better for walking but no longer so good for climbing trees or clinging to mum, and this had profound consequences for mum and baby and us.

Walking upright meant the capability of longer distance travel to forage by day. At night however, sleeping on the ground meant greater exposure to predators and necessitating the return to a central sleeping place and a larger, more cohesive group structure, to defend the nest. In this dynamic of multi-level selection, where the selfishness of the survival of the individual and his genes is mitigated by the increased survival chances of those genes if the group worked well together, is the essence of the human condition. The coalescence of selfishness and altruism, combining yet in contradiction, unique and unresolvable, remains at the core of all human drama , but that is another story. For this story the proto-abilities to read the intentions of others born of these ground dwellers’ social groupings would become crucial for the development of words, words, words as we know them.

Two million years ago, with increasingly free arms to work with our ancestors added meat to their vegetarian diet. Using rocks to crack animal bones and thereupon suck out the highly nutritious marrow within, and later developing primitive stone tools to scrape meat from scavenged carcasses felled by other predators our ancestors developed brains that were twice as big as those of apes living today. Bigger brained babies had much more difficulty fitting through the narrowed pelvic canal which was needed for walking upright. Consequently those who survived best were counter-intuitively less mature, requiring more parental attention in the early years of life, requiring yet more social organization and cohesion of the group.

As walking ability increased in efficiency with more streamlined bones the social groups that had evolved to defend ground nests began to run. Losing much of their body hair and gaining sweat glands they could organize persistence hunting parties, that could outrun faster prey to the point of exhaustion, providing the now necessary nutrients for their bigger brains and energizing yet more ingenuity. Baby meanwhile had even less chance of clinging to now hairless momma and our hunter gatherer need to organize child-care.

As witnesses to the fires caused by lightning strikes our roaming ancestors found cooked meat and roasted seeds, and more accessible root tubers in the wake of the storm. Cooked meat yielded yet more, and more easily digestible, nutrient power for the brain. And using that brain early humans mastered the use of fire to cook with; fire to drive animal prey to capture; fire to better night-time security and warm their hairless bodies around the campfires.

And all the while, momma who had to scavenge as well as carry baby around, would increasingly have to put baby down on the ground to free both her hands to dig root tubers and pick berries. Crucially she needed some means of verbal communication with baby. In the beginning then, —not really the beginning, but in the beginning-ish— was the word. Not really a word, more of a click, but a new development and a step up from an animal cry.

The click was mother signaling to baby. Baby himself, momentarily left alone on the ground, needed a distress cry that is louder than a motorbike engine being revved to the max. Momma’s click turned into a coo to reassure baby and she picked baby up to reinforce the feeling in baby that momma was nearby and baby was safe. Baby was able to read momma’s intention. It may have been an early lullaby or some sing song motherse, but this proto-linguistic sign that momma was on hand enabled her to put her baby down again whilst she gathered some more food, and baby knew that it was okay to settle for a time. Implicit in this interaction is the peek-a-boo playfulness of early abstract thought … that even though baby cannot see momma at all times, baby can hear her soothing tones, and then imagine her face and know she is not too dangerously far away.

Once upon a time, as baby grew to be able to stand on his own two infant feet he looked at momma and lifted his arms aloft, as his ancestors had done to climb trees, and he said something which sounded like “Up!”