Language is a virus, and you're infected. Are humans superpredators or our only hope?
A new book suggests humanity might be worth saving after all.
I’ve always loved the idea that language is a virus. About 300,000 years ago, homo sapiens first appeared in Africa. Good on us! Brand new, and already traveling the world! We hunted, we gathered, we organized HOAs, and did all the things that humans do except talk. For the first 100,000-150,000 years we existed as a species, we did not have language, which means the invention of the eye roll predates the first time someone said, “I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” Think about this: Humans farted for a hundred millennia without ever telling a single fart joke. We were so simple then.
Then, in eastern or southern Africa, on some ordinary Tuesday about 150,000-200,000 years ago or so, language appeared. It took up unused real estate in our brains and quickly spread, and 70,000 years later homo sapiens all over the world had language, and then 40,000 years ago — which is generally pegged as the dawn of modern homo sapiens — we start seeing art and other primitive cultural artifacts such as musical instruments, sewing needles, and the Fifty Shades series.
There is also evidence that the development of language is linked to making tools. True, tools have existed for millions of years, but a study in 2013 found that “that toolmaking and language use similar parts of the brain, including regions involved in manual manipulations and speech production. Moreover, the overlap is greater the more sophisticated the toolmaking techniques are.”
Why us, though, and not Neanderthals, who also had large brains? Scientists have gone back and forth about whether there is a “language gene” that made humans susceptible to this virus. I don’t know, but I think there’s a clue in when Neanderthals went extinct. They seemed to be thriving for a while. They made tools, used plants for medicine, could create fire, and knew how to treat injuries. But they left behind “almost no evidence of the symbolic thinking—no art or sculpture for example—that we often associate with language, and little evidence of the cultural attainments of Homo sapiens of the same era.”
But 40,000 years ago, they were gone. Why they disappeared is “highly contested” among paleoanthropologists, who have suggested many possible causes including inbreeding, but if this were so, explain the continued existence of northern Louisiana.
I wonder if there is more than a coincidence that Neanderthals disappeared around the same time humans, infected with the language virus, started making more sophisticated tools. We developed language about the same time a competing species, who existed close enough to have dropped off some DNA in our gene pool, went extinct.
The first thing we did as modern humans is kill the species most like us. We like to think of language as a giant leap forward in our evolution, but we didn’t choose language. We certainly didn’t need it — we existed for more than 100,000 years without it — but once it popped into our heads we sure found use for it. As carriers of this virus, we have become the deadliest predator ever known. T Rex? Please. A comet killed the dinosaurs. Now humans, which have killed off 900 species in the last 500 or so years alone, have our planet on our kill list. Thanks to language, we are the comet.
We suck.
Or maybe not. In his well-reviewed and surprising new book, The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life, my friend Simran Jeet Singh draws from his faith to offer some surprisingly encouraging insights on how to be happy. And I say “surprising” because, well… /gestures dispiritedly at the window/… The world seems a bit dark right now, and my faith has taken a few hits. Anger and despair have been making a lot of sense lately.
In the prologue, he recounts a Punjabi folktale about a lantern:
There is an old tale about when the sun was first setting. As her distance narrowed to the horizon, the light on earth slowly diminished. This made way for darkness to creep over the land. The people were afraid that when the sun would finally set, darkness would be permanent. “What will happen to us?” they said.
Far, far across the land, in a small hut, a little lantern lifted its wick. It said, “I challenge the darkness. In my small corner, I will not let the darkness settle itself around me.” With this example many other little lanterns in other small huts lifted their wicks to the darkness. And the people watched in amazement as so many little lanterns illuminated the earth, preventing the mask of darkness from taking over.
Those aren’t Simran’s words but an excerpt of the last speech of Jaswant Singh Khalra, a banker who discovered in the 1980s that Punjab police had been systematically murdering about 25,000 Sikhs. In 1995, Khalra visted Canada to spread the word of what was happening to his fellow Sihks, but supporters there urged him to ask for political asylum. He told them that truth and justice are stronger than fear, and then he told them the story of the lantern. When he returned home, he disappeared, and 10 years later, six Punjab police officers were convicted of his murder.
This is your choice: give into the deepening darkness or hang a lantern and damn the torpedoes.
“Hopefulness brings us happiness in the present, and it also plants the seeds of happiness for our futures,” writes Simran. “It’s easy to remember that negativity is a self-perpetuating cycle—it’s even easier to forget that positivity is a self-perpetuating cycle, too.”
Hopelessness is doing landrush business these days. No one needs to convince me that things have gone a bit squiffy as of late. We can all see the darkness rising, and none of us can stop the sun from setting. But we can hang a lantern.
I can hang a lantern.
If you’re curious about where he gets off being optimistic and hopeful in this suboptimal epoch, I’d invite you to stop by Book People on Tuesday at 7pm when Simran and I will be having a conversation about his marvelous book. You can pick up a copy there, and I bet Simran would be thrilled to sign it for you. Hope to see you there. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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