3 days ago
New research says humans learned to speak partly because babies are too hard to take care of alone
Earlier this week, while we were all busy with the (now paused) war in Iran and the (very much ongoing) court battle over soldiers in L.A. streets, my baby started saying my name.
It's a moment every mother waits for — particularly those among us who are aggrieved that our offspring decide to learn 'baba' or 'dada' or 'papa' first. My own infant has been saying 'abba' for almost two months. But this week, for the first time, he started saying 'ima' — not EEE-ma as my older children howl it, but i-mAH, i-mAH, i-mAH, like a tiny body builder huffing through a dead lift.
Then, in typical Leo fashion, he clapped for himself.
Like all babies, my youngest son learned this through arduous repetition. You may have seen the fascinating paper in Science Advances this week (discussed in the New York Times) analyzing 'infant-directed communication' — i.e., baby talk — in primates.
That paper concludes that we talk 'orders of magnitude' more to our babies than our ape cousins do, and hypothesizes that this habit likely played a 'critical role in the emergence of human language.'
In her forthcoming book, 'The Origin of Language,' evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman argues the genetic fluke that left our ancestors with huge brains and vocal apparatus capable of complex sound also forced us to give birth to infants so radically 'premature' that we'd have gone extinct trying to care for them as independently as other social primates do. To survive, we had to learn to yap.
I spoke to Beekman about her book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I've read other language origin stories, including Yuval Noah Harari's 'Sapiens' and a bit of Noam Chomsky's 'Language and Mind.' Where do you diverge?
They all have examples of why language is important once you have it, but no one explains how we got it.
Your explanation really begins with Lucy, the first of our ancestors who could not give birth unassisted and would have had a more difficult early motherhood than modern great apes. That pushed our social evolution. What's the next big leap?
There's a particular gene that we call a pseudogene because it stopped functioning [in other closely related primates]. In our species, for some reason, it got repaired and started to copy itself. That led to this ballooning brain. It also changed our throat, so we are now able to make sounds that are able to be molded into a language.
[Now] babies needed to be born much earlier, way before their brain was developed.
[Many scientists now believe it's this energetic cost of building our brains, not the 'obstetric dilemma' between big head and narrow pelvis, that determines when humans give birth.]
They're born with extremely neuroplastic brains — they're basically sponges for information, and they needed to be such responsive and quick learners because they basically had to manipulate the individuals around them to take care of them.
The baby brain is a great gateway for language to be transferred from brain to brain. All the main connections in the brain still have to be formed, and that all happens in a social context, because it all happens outside of the womb.
We are extremely social because language allowed us to be extremely social.
So the problem of child care forced us to learn to talk to each other?
People have done calculations that show for a hunter-gatherer child, it takes 15 years before she's able to gather enough nutrients to sustain herself. For 15 years, she's dependent on other individuals.
Women in the western world have been indoctrinated that you are the most important individual for your child. Of course you are, but you're not the only important individual for your child, and the more loving individuals you have around your child the better it is for them.
A selection of the very best reads from The Times' 143-year archive.
Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorKarim Doumar, head of newsletters
How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
