Did our free-roaming minds set the stage for language, as we mimed our adventures, real or imaginary? A new book explores an important theory about language

Tricky question: just how could mime morph into speech? Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos

HUMAN language has long appeared miraculous. It has enabled us to accumulate knowledge, build cultures and conquer the planet, making us a creature seemingly apart from the rest of the animal world.

In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such “miraculist” explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated.

Corballis, now an emeritus professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has spent a lifetime studying language and his book is a delight; it is confident, wise and witty.

The idea of rooting language in gesture is not new. Its key exponents are two more Michaels: Michael Tomasello, a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Michael Arbib, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

They have a good reason to consider that human speech didn’t evolve directly from primate vocalisations. Ape calls are spontaneous, involuntary expressions of emotion, made even when there is no one to hear. Hand movements are different. They are voluntary and can be finely controlled. It’s easy to shape fingers to represent objects or wiggle them to mimic movement.

Each of the Michaels has their own story, with Corballis’s new account unique in stressing “mind wandering”, the subject of one of his earlier books, and storytelling as important parts of the long journey to language.

“Our ‘mind wandering’ may be built on an ancient ability to map movements and plan journeys”

When we have nothing much to do, our minds travel through past experiences, future plans and imaginary possibilities. The process of mind wandering, or daydreaming, is more remarkable than it seems. It shows our capacity to recall particular episodes from the past and project them freely into possible situations in the future, even though we are not using words, but thinking in images.

Corballis quotes approvingly the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.” We have the good sort that allows us to travel forwards, too. Without that, we would live in an “eternal now” and language couldn’t have evolved.

Where did mind wandering come from? Corballis explores the evidence that other animals share some of this power of thought. Birds that cache food may remember where they hid it and also its “use by” date so they won’t go to find it after it has gone off. Chimps and bonobos that have been shown King Kong-style movies demonstrate by where they look on screen that they anticipate what will happen next when they watch the films again.

Crucially, recordings of the rat hippocampus – the part of the brain that lays down memories – show how the brain constructs maps of movement in space and time. Our mind wandering may be built on an ancient ability to map movements and plan journeys.

Acting it out

Telling stories allows us to share those wanderings with others. Corballis quotes another researcher’s fictional account of our early ancestors returning from a hunt with a kill and acting out the day’s events, then miming plans for tomorrow. It is easy to picture and to see how the power of such stories could drive future cooperative activity.

Corballis agrees with Aristotle that fiction is more important than history because it deals with possibility. If the gestures of mime become standardised and abstract – which happens naturally in modern sign languages – communication would grow ever more fluent. This is a move towards language.

All this is just a part of the vista Corballis wants us to see. There is much more, including the ability of languages to refer to things that are not present, theory of mind and the emergence of grammar to make language more efficient. The trickiest section, however, is at the end when we reach the final step, as sound goes from an accompaniment of mime to a replacement, turning into speech.

At this point, I have doubts and must admit, as Corballis does on his final page, that he too might be writing a just-so story, despite the breadth of his evidence. Still, I much prefer a speculative account of how language might have evolved to an invocation of miracles. And, right or wrong, Corballis will make you see your own mind differently.

The Truth About Language: What it is and where it came from Michael Corballis University of Chicago Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “Talking with hands”