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Review article
Co-operation and the origins of spoken language
B otha , R udolf & C hris K night (eds). The cradle of language. xviii, 386 pp., maps, gs, tables, plates, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2009. 75.00 (cloth) B otha , R udolf & C hris K night (eds). The prehistory of language. xviii, 384 pp., gs, tables, bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2009. 70.00 (cloth) B urling , R obbins . The talking ape: how language evolved. ix, 298 pp., tables, illus., blibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2005. 9.99 (paper). D unbar , R obin . Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. 240 pp. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. 7.16 (download) T omasello , M ichael . Origins of human communication. xiii, 393 pp., gs, tables, bibliogr. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. 26.95 (cloth) them, however, I was drawn back to three other, relatively recent volumes, all of which address comparable issues in rather different ways. These are Robin Dunbars Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language (1996); Michael Tomasellos Origins of human communication (2008); and Robbins Burlings The talking ape: how language evolved (2005). Starting with the Botha and Knight volumes, the title of the rst, The cradle of language, reects its focus on a range of features concerning specically African origins of language. Since hominids originated in Africa, this is clearly appropriate. There are chapters discussing implications for spoken language of personal ornaments, artefacts, fossils, and the use of red ochre. Others look at specic aspects of African languages, typologies of African languages, the click feature, and contemporary observations on non-verbal communication such as mimicry and play. More theoretical chapters consider a possible genetic language revolution, genetic factors in language diversity, and the jural implications of using red ochre. Botha and Knights other book is The prehistory of language. This offers a multi-perspective approach to the evolution of language and speech, its chapters raising such questions as: Why do only humans have language?; and Is sociality a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of language? Other chapters explore the co-evolution of language and music; the cultural niche as an evolutionary cradle of language; the normative function and structure of play; and the ontogeny and phylogeny of non-deixis. Still others focus on such wide-ranging topics as referential gestures; the origin of a lexicon; language and symbolization; grammar from a bio-linguistic perspective; the evolution of modern speech; the signicance for evolution of why women speak better than men; and nally neurology and anatomical plausibility.

Background
I initially agreed to review two major edited books which present in detail aspects of recent research on the origins of human spoken language. Both books are based on papers from a conference for local and international scholars, in Stellenbosch, South Africa (2006). Both are edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight, and both were published in 2009. In reading

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Many perspectives are indeed reected in these chapters. Some raise thoughtful questions about the nature of conditions within which spoken language might have emerged (what was the role of sociality in early language; what might have specially predisposed early hominids to initiating orality; how are gestures related to spoken language?). Others seek to follow the classic Darwinian mode, looking for clear genetic advantages for aspects of early speech. The scope of material covered here is excellent, and many chapters are both scholarly and original. It was wise and provocative to use the rst volume to frame questions about the specically African origin of spoken language. This should initiate a good debate. The chapters in The prehistory of language range widely across disciplines and theoretical perspectives, many with impressive scholarship. Some will be classics in this important eld. The contributions from Dunbar, from Steels, and from Ragir and Savage-Rumbaugh reect this readers own interests. Others will be intrigued more by linguistic contributions or those discussing theoretical issues. looked again at joking relations across societies in terms of how strongly marked roles tend to shape and be shaped by xed dialogues. In his classic work on social systems, Nadel (1957) saw social roles as the key to how humans built their societies. Roles were powerful because they were paired. For instance, men were fathers in relation to sons, and sons in relation to their fathers. For each role/person, there are rights and obligations in relation to the other. Since each individual had several roles, and roles overlapped, even in small communities, roles led to quite complex relations. We must remember that roles entail specic ways of conversing. Dyads entail dialogues.1 This leads us back to the basic problem of the two Botha and Knight volumes: how were early humans able to move into this magic domain of orality?

Aspects of dialogue
Two recent books make very different suggestions. Both Robbins Burling in The talking ape and Michael Tomasello in Origins of human communication argue, with detailed evidence, that proto-language must have rst developed from gestures. These two researchers come from quite different backgrounds: Burling is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in language; Tomasello is a researcher who rst worked with non-human primates, and then applied similar methods in working with human mothers, fathers, and young children. It is worth briey following the path of each before stepping back to look at them together.

Another perspective
Linguist friends of mine (like John and Jenny Gumpertz, Stephen Levinson and Penny Brown) would agree that I am not a linguist. Rather, as a social anthropologist I awkwardly keep nding that the best way to understand socio-cultural dynamics is through the way people use language together. In writing about eldwork in northern Ghana, what was most fascinating to me was the interplay between socio-cultural frames and individual actions. For my book on Gonja kinship (Goody 1973), genealogies and tables needed to be placed in the context of what I called relational idioms: greeting practices and how these are used to manage relationships; beliefs about and controlling of ancestral forces; the preparing and sharing of food at rituals; and the dynamics of witchcraft. All of these relational idioms are strongly patterned ways in which actors manage socio-cultural issues by talking together. For each idiom, much of the dialogue follows formal patterns, and often the same formality of patterns appears, indeed recurs, across time and space. The same can be said of many other domains. Penny Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987 [1978]) elegantly showed that across differing societies, social relations are managed, often controlled, through patterns of language based on politeness. Again dialogue follows set forms. In my work with the Daboya weavers, when and how questions could be used was about managing the affect and power in the relations between master and apprentice, not about seeking information (Goody 1978; 1982). In my Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture (Goody 1997), I

Robbins Burling
Beginning with gestures, Burling lays out several early communicative skills he sees as necessary prerequisites for spoken language: imitation, motivated signs, joint attention, and the ability to nd patterns. But they do not explain how or why language actually began (p. 88). He considers in turn several suggested launching mechanisms, none of which he nds satisfactory. Finally he concludes that the shift into oral spoken language must have been the result of emergent physical properties of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity. However, Burling agrees with the Chomskian view that language is so complex that whatever the earliest evolutionary mode, by now it must be built into us by our biological inheritance (p. 89). His most insightful observation here is that it is almost impossible to prevent children today from learning to speak. The main part of the book is devoted to working out probable successive stages in the development of complex spoken language: signs and symbols; icons; words; syntax and grammar. (This is a linguists problem, and it is considered by several of the

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chapters in the second of the Botha and Knight volumes. William Foleys Anthropological linguistics [1997]) lays out this material systematically and elegantly.) One point which Burling sees as clear, and as critical to understanding how human language evolved, is that comprehension must have preceded the ability to produce spoken language (pp. 4, 20-1, et passim). test it, but which permit him to rene it. The chapter on human cooperative communication is based on early parent/infant observations. It examines pointing, pantomiming, and conventions for pre-verbal infants. Clearly parents and infants today do use these ways of building shared intentional communication that does not depend on spoken language. (Of course, since birth, these infants have lived in a speaking/listening/responding world: see Bruner 1975; Goody 1978; Schieffelin 1990; and particularly Vygotsky 1962.) Let us agree that today co-operation and close attention are the basis for reciprocally shared understanding of communication about intentions. The way this emerges in daily exchanges is clear in Tomasellos deep and thoughtful observations of the ways parents and infants successfully do communicate intentions. However, this material again poses the question: how did this vital combination of co-operation and close attention to others meanings come about for early hominids? There may be a clue in the clear strong difference between Burling and Tomasello as to whether the skill of comprehension or the skill of appropriately producing spoken language was rst to emerge. What is striking in comparing their analyses is that Burling holds that it was coming to understand that was critical for the transition to early spoken language. However, Tomasello takes the opposite view, arguing eloquently that this transition must have depended on increasing skills in producing meaningful speech. We are concerned here with the task of identifying and describing the processes though which hominids developed spoken language. Emergent skills are different from genetically specied ones, in that originally they have resulted relatively recently from adaptive processes.2 This requires that we model and study the socio-cultural and linguistic processes involved in early language. Since we are concerned with adaptive processes, what are we to make of the difference between Burling and Tomasello as to whether understanding speech or producing appropriate speech is the critical process for the hominid emergence of spoken language? It seems that in working out how speech may have begun, Burling asked: How might the early hominids have advanced in understanding?, while for Tomasello the question was: How might early hominids have come to develop the necessary physical capacity and skills for speech? Such processes as are suggested relate specically to understanding or to speaking. In fact, if one tries to model conversation for an early proto-language, it is difcult to give primacy to either production or comprehension. Surely each requires the other. It is neither comprehension nor production that is primary, but dialogue itself.

Michael Tomasello
Tomasellos book is based on two sets of detailed empirical studies of primates. It begins with research on intentional communication and co-operation in apes, neither of which in effect exist: apes do not seem to communicate intentionally, and they do not co-operate. This is followed by parallel research on co-operation among humans. The absence of intentional communication among apes, and the fact that they rarely use meaningful calls, mean that apes have no likely vocal paths for language emergence. Apes do, however, use gestures and facial expressions. The only way to understand how language could have begun, Tomasello says, is not through studying modern language, but by discovering how humans come to share meanings without language. The ultimate explanation for how it is that human beings are able to communicate with one another in such complex ways with simple gestures is that they have unique ways of engaging with one another socially in general. More specically, human beings cooperate with one another in species-unique ways involving processes of shared intentionally (p. 72, original emphasis). He continues: The basic psychological underpinning of the ability to participate with others in acts of shared intentionality, including communicating with them in human-like ways, is the ability to engage with others in a human cooperative manner (p. 73). Tomasello quotes the philosopher/linguist Searle: [Shared] intentionality predisposes a background sense of the other as a candidate for cooperative agency ... [which] is a necessary condition of all collective behaviours, and hence all conversation (Searle 1990: 414-15) The strength of Tomasellos work is that when he has an idea, he sets out to design experiments not just to

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Is this the key to the central role of co-operation on which the philosopher/linguist Grice says all meaningful conversation depends? The dyadic exchanges which are conversation seem to work because they require, and reward, co-operation between two (or more) local folk.3 Tomasello sees his emphasis on the necessity of co-operation for emergence of spoken language as supported by Grices seminal analysis (1957; 1989). This leaves us with the critical question: hominid co-operation is strikingly opposite to the lack of co-operation among our closest relatives, the apes. How did hominid co-operation come about? And how is it related to reciprocal attention to the shared construction of meaning? Burling and Tomasello both insist that for early hominids intentional communication about shared goals must have begun with gestures. However, with apes, both cognition and physiology fail to support the vocalizing of signals. One possibility would be that as meaning was gradually shaped by augmenting gestures with oral mutterings, joint attention was increasingly important in working out how meaningful the gesture/oral comment process was. Both understanding and crude oral production would support each other.

Concluding thoughts
Suppose that the ape line which gradually led to hominids had been similar to bonobos in combining high intelligence with mild and affectionate sociality. Suppose again that their non-agonistic mode of relating supported increasing group sizes, as Dunbar argues. Was this the context in which interest in others intentions happened to coincide with combining oral comments on gestures perhaps during grooming and did this begin to produce meaningful early speech? Once early speech happened, this could have had two mutually reinforcing effects. On the one hand, the possibility of effectively conveying and understanding meanings could have made close attention interesting and important. It makes sense that this could have set up a momentum for the gradual improvement of both the cognitive and physical structures necessary for eventual complex language. On the other hand, it is surely likely that even crude early speech decidedly improved the survival effectiveness of the rst hominids. It paid off, and gradually some aspects have been expressed genetically. In the Prehistory of language volume, Luc Steels argues that sociality must have been a prerequisite for the emergence of spoken language. The hypothetical sketch of possible language emergence outlined above does depend on strong sociality. However, an implication of this analysis is that extreme human sociality may have in part been a by-product, and was strongly supported by the very processes through which spoken language emerged. Here the shift to dialogue was likely to have been critical. In his scenario for the switch to the vocal modality, Tomasello points out that communicating though gestures can convey intentions because actors share mind-reading skills. However, as gestures are linked to vocalization, dialogue begins to go beyond mind-reading in at least two ways. Even such crude early language would clarify the sharing of goals and intentions. But, further, simple gesture-supported language would engage several ways of checking, and if necessary correcting, the t between intended and uttered messages. Contemporary conversations are in fact constructed in this way (see chapters in section II of Goody 1995a.) In fact, dialogue not only supports co-operation. Role dyads are the rst and still most basic mode of social relating. And role dyads both require co-operation and elicit dialogue.4

A transition to spoken language

Supposing, as several scholars suggest, that the rst mode of symbolic communication of early hominids was gestural, we would need to ask: what was the nature of the eventual transition to early spoken language? Here Robin Dunbars book Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language slots beautifully into place. His observations of the important role grooming plays in group dynamics of apes led him to ask what changing conditions might have brought spoken language into ape society. He suggests that as early primate groups became larger, the close relations on which grooming depends would no longer be possible. Gradually grooming was accompanied by oral utterances, which became spoken language. Since there is no specic evidence as to the nature of such a proto-language, Dunbar terms this rst early language gossip. How does this t with the likelihood of rst communication being gestural? One possible path could have been spontaneous/random oral utterances used to indicate which of several possible meanings was intended for a common gesture. The pairing of gestures and oral comments would be used and transmitted within the local interacting group. Over time this would gradually shape oral and vocal physiology and the linked cognition, to support further emerging oral and comprehension speech skills.

NOTES
1 The nature and signicance of dialogue are discussed and documented in chapters of a book in progress. Work on dialogue in northern Ghana classrooms shows a strong tendency for the

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routinization of frequently used patterns (see reports to the Spencer Foundation and to the Economic and Social Research Council). 2 Of course most species differences came originally from encoding changing adaptive forms genetically. See Darwins work on the species variations of robins from different Galapagos Islands. Work by Daniel Lack (1950) returns to this Galapagos research, showing that species differentiation can sometimes occur very quickly. 3 In fact, research on conversation describes and analyses just such joint construction of shared meaning (see Clark 1992; Drew 1995; Hutchins & Hazlehurst 1995; Streeck 1995). 4 In my chapter on Prayer in the book Social intelligence and interaction it was suggested that both prayer and divination are best understood as taking the forms they do because we have a kind of dialogue template (Goody 1995b). Clearly this begs the question of what could have been the origin of such a template. Esther N. Goody Murray Edwards College, Cambridge 1982. Daboya weavers: relations of production, dependence and reciprocity. In From craft to industry: the ethnography of proto-industrial cloth production (ed.) E.N. Goody, 50-84. Cambridge: University Press. 1997. Social intelligence and the emergence of roles and rules. Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. Proceedings of the British Academy 1997 Lectures and Memoirs, 119-47. (ed.) 1995a. Social intelligence and interaction: expressions and implications of the social bias of human intelligence. Cambridge: University Press. 1995b. Social intelligence and prayer as dialogue. In Social intelligence and interaction: expressions and implications of the social bias of human intelligence (ed.) E.N. Goody, 206-20. Cambridge: University Press. Grice, H.P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66, 377-88. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hutchins, E. & B. Hazlehurst 1995. How to invent a shared lexicon: the emergence of shared form-meaning mappings in interaction. In Social intelligence and interaction: expressions and implications of the social bias of human intelligence (ed.) E.N. Goody, 53-67. Cambridge: University Press. Lack, D. 1950. Robin Redbreast. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nadel, S.F. 1957. The theory of social structure. New York: Cohen & West. Schieffelin, B. 1990. The give and take of everyday life: language socialization of Kaluli children. Cambridge: University Press. Searle, J.R. 1990. Collective intentions and action. In Intentions in communication (eds) P.R. Cohen, J. Morgan & M.E. Pollack, 401-16. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Streeck, J. 1995. On projection. In Social intelligence and interaction: expressions and implications of the social bias of human intelligence (ed.) E.N. Goody, 87-110. Cambridge: University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. 1962. Thought and language (ed.) A. Kozulin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

REFERENCES
Brown, P. & S.C. Levinson 1987 [1978]. Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: University Press. Bruner, J.S. 1975. From communication to language: a psychological perspective. In Cognition (ed.) I. Markov, 3, 255-87. Chichester. Clark, H. 1992. Arenas of language use. Chicago: University Press. Drew, P. 1995. Interaction sequences and anticipatory interactive planning. In Social intelligence and interaction: expressions and implications of the social bias of human intelligence (ed.) E.N. Goody, 111-38. Cambridge: University Press. Foley, W. 1997. Anthropological linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Goody, E.N. 1973. Contexts of kinship: an essay in the family sociology of the Gonja and northern Ghana. Cambridge: University Press. 1978. Towards a theory of questions. In Questions and politeness: strategies on social interaction (ed.) E.N. Goody, 17-43. Cambridge: University Press.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 461-465 Royal Anthropological Institute 2012