Thank you for the review. Of course every reader has to make up their own mind about the book, but I thought that perhaps it would be worthwhile mentioning that I did not set out to figure out what the origin of language is. My aim was to explain the evolutionary process to a general audience and I thought that humans would provide a good framework. Along the way I found, in my mind, a convincing explanation for why we have language. This was never supposed to be a feminist book, although I do think that the narrative regarding our evolution traditionally has been dominated by a more masculine view. Yet, natural selection acts on the number of offspring an individual can produce (and this includes fathers) and I thought it strange that no explanation for why we have language could directly be linked to an increase in fitness. Also note that I make it clear that fathers are as important as mothers, as a single parent cannot successfully raise a human child.
"Language is a defining feature of our species, yet the genomic changes enabling it remain poorly understood. Despite decades of work since FOXP2’s discovery, we still lack a clear picture of which regions shaped language evolution and how variation contributes to present-day phenotypic differences. Using a novel evolutionary stratified polygenic score approach in nearly 40,000 individuals, we find that Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs) are specifically associated with language but not general cognition. HAQERs evolved before the human–Neanderthal split, giving hominins increased binding of Forkhead and Homeobox transcription factors, and show balancing selection across the past 20,000 years. Remarkably, language variants in HAQERs appear more prevalent in Neanderthals and have convergently evolved across vocal-learning mammals. Our results reveal how ancient innovations continue shaping human language."
I enjoyed your book! It was a great overview of human evolution. The language question is, of course, a frustrating one. Your view, the infectious metaphor, came down in a similar place to David Krakauer's and Cormac McCarthy's view, which is discussed in "The Kekule Problem" essay (2017) by the latter. I recently wrote about that essay as well.
Perhaps I'm more of an adaptionists or just see less distinction between biological and social processes, but I'm more inclined, at the 10000 foot level, towards it coming about in a similar way to other complex traits.
I'm glad you found my review! Appreciate the engagement!
Tool-making should be considered a principal component of the selective pressures which led to language. According to the Beekman model of behaviors following brains, "after getting big brains and speaking language, we were then able to make tools." I see it in the opposite way: that tools precede language, but that tool-making creates communicative pressures. For example, explaining, gesturing, specialization, and general "memetic emulative ability."
The ability to see a tool, and copy that behavior, seems to mirror the ability to hear language and copy that phoneme. My conclusion, therefore, is that the development of bipedalism was necessary for language, since it enabled free hands, which enabled tool culture, which enlarged the structures needed for memetic emulation, which are the basis of language.
Yes, that's an important observation. Beekman does agree to an extent, making a similar point about the importance of bipedalism freeing the hands, though she also makes this relevant to childcare responsibilities:
Chimp young hang to the mother (obviously our nakedness is relevant here but is bound up with bipedalism), while human mothers are compelled to carry young (i.e. a greater burden).
Relatedly, one of my big issues is that her theory doesn't actually exclude there other vectors of selection (tool-making, reputation management/gossip, etc).
>Although I can’t claim that there is a bonafide trend, I’ve increasingly noticed a growing interest in revising our understanding of the role women in human evolution.
Could also be a regression to the mean of the last 150 years, where at times it was quite mainstream to say the human condition evolved among women. This reads as a “Mother Goddess” throwback to the 90s now, but plenty of victorians, nazis, and communists had their own reasons for thinking women would have invented/evolved real human culture first.
>Beekman reveals herself as one of the somewhat sophomoric and misanthropic members of her discipline
Unfortunately extremely common, sometimes bleeding into a reactionary urge to downplay human fitness supremacy. Some combination of our biology and culture clearly broke the game, no sense in denying that.
>Why based on these data alone, does Beekman think archaic and modern human couldn’t speak to each other despite many instances of interbreeding?
FWIW, Reich discussed the Gokhman et al paper about methylation, also citing it as possible evidence that only sapiens had real language.
>In my view, however, I think it is almost certainly the case that subjective experience preceded complex language in the course of evolution.
Agree on this. Subjective experience goes back very far. My model is that around 60,000 years ago Sapiens evolved language / stories / symbolic thought, and that was enough to take over the planet, but the story “I” was not completely evolved or culturally held in place until ~10,000 years ago (very roughly).
To your comment about it being wise to push back our estimates of various evolutionary milestones, on this issue, scientists have been too eager to say sapiens aren’t special and accept that once *any* uniquely human culture evolved the whole package was put together and set in stone.
>metaphorically arguing that language is a virus and the brains of children are a very susceptible and hospitable hosts.
I wonder what the phenomenology of that spreading would be like. Hmm…
Also, if that is your view of abilities as basic as language I think there is enough evidence of diffusion to say that the Sapient Paradox is probably explained by some cultural package spreading.
>Could also be a regression to the mean of the last 150 years, where at times it was quite mainstream to say the human condition evolved among women. This reads as a “Mother Goddess” throwback to the 90s now, but plenty of victorians, nazis, and communists had their own reasons for thinking women would have invented/evolved real human culture first.
My read is that the desire for feminist revisionism on evolution is the same as race revisionism in anthropology from Boas. The stories about our origins are thought to have potent influence on our politics (informed strongly by Hitler & WWII) so the stories need to conform to the desirable political sensibilities.
>FWIW, Reich discussed the Gokhman et al paper about methylation, also citing it as possible evidence that only sapiens had real language.
My understanding of Reich's tentative acceptance of this data was that human language likely showed more phonemic complexity rather than complex language being entirely inaccessible to Neanderthals. I think the many admixture events between archaic and modern humans would require a meaningful ability to communicate across this divide, especially if childcare was the reason why language evolved in the first place.
>To your comment about it being wise to push back our estimates of various evolutionary milestones, on this issue, scientists have been too eager to say sapiens aren’t special and accept that once *any* uniquely human culture evolved the whole package was put together and set in stone.
I think the modern human phenotype is special but that it took just took a long time to scale. I like the thought experiment of placing someone with a genius IQ (von Neumann) in a hunter-gatherer group (say we even let the genius come with modern knowledge and technology), what is the most they could get a band of 150 humans to do? To answer the rhetorical: It just took a long time to scale up.
Have you looked into Muthukrishna's Cultural Brain Hypothesis extension of Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis?
In his conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, Reich was discussing the paper in the context of what gave sapiens the edge to conquer the world. What did we have that Neanderthals didn't. I clip part of it here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/i/148733976/the-evolution-of-language
I'm sure he has nuanced opinions that cover both positions, just saying he has been more aggressive in his interpretation of that data.
>To answer the rhetorical: It just took a long time to scale up.
Hard to say a priori how long it would take to scale up, right? We can reject Chomsky-type proposals of a single generation, but what about 10,000 vs 1,000,000 years? If you assume heritability of 0.5 (or even 0.1), you don't need very much of a fitness advantage to scale up pretty fast. Groups 60,000 years apart could be extremely different. I'm hopeful ancient DNA will help ground these debates (shoutout to Akbari and Reich).
>Have you looked into Muthukrishna's Cultural Brain Hypothesis extension of Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis?
I have not, you find it more convincing? Interestingly Dunbar argues women would have been the vanguard of language in Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language.
>I'm sure he has nuanced opinions that cover both positions, just saying he has been more aggressive in his interpretation of that data.
Yes, I think I heard him discuss the Grokman 2020 paper one other place, and it seemed he's not all in on the finding, but yes, I do think he's sees it as part of the reason the modern human lineage persisted as other human lineages went extinct. However, I think he'd also believe that Neanderthals had human language. (side note: wonder what Razib's position would be?).
>Hard to say a priori how long it would take to scale up, right?
Right, the devil is really in the details, but I think based on what we know about forager life, "effective population" size from aDNA and population genetics, and looking at the many evidence points for how isolated and sparsely distributed Neanderthals were in Eurasia (as an interesting comparison too) that group size and cooperative dynamics were an important factor in human species survival/success.
>I have not, you find it more convincing? Interestingly Dunbar argues women would have been the vanguard of language in Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language.
Yes, so the SBH and CBH are really nice because especially the latter is an actual quantitative model that generalize across the animal kingdom and distinguishes between asocial and social species. I cite the Muthukrishna paper (PMID: 30408028 - also here's his thesis - https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.016651) in this piece (Read his book as well). He trained as a post-doc under Joseph Henrich.
I too am convinced by some of the claims about gossip vs freeriding/deception creating a bit of a social reputation management arms race in intelligence. Harari and Pinker have always loved this Dunbar argument too. Bennett, the AI startup guy who wrote a book on the history of intelligence under the guidance of some big scientists (notably LeDoux), also found the Dunbar stuff pretty convincing. Dunbar's number comes in for a lot of criticism now, especially after Gladwell popularization, but the broader social brain idea is very interesting and fits nicely into gene-culture coevolution ideas that have blossomed since.
Thank you for the review. Of course every reader has to make up their own mind about the book, but I thought that perhaps it would be worthwhile mentioning that I did not set out to figure out what the origin of language is. My aim was to explain the evolutionary process to a general audience and I thought that humans would provide a good framework. Along the way I found, in my mind, a convincing explanation for why we have language. This was never supposed to be a feminist book, although I do think that the narrative regarding our evolution traditionally has been dominated by a more masculine view. Yet, natural selection acts on the number of offspring an individual can produce (and this includes fathers) and I thought it strange that no explanation for why we have language could directly be linked to an increase in fitness. Also note that I make it clear that fathers are as important as mothers, as a single parent cannot successfully raise a human child.
You may find this paper interesting --> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.07.641231v4
From abstract:
"Language is a defining feature of our species, yet the genomic changes enabling it remain poorly understood. Despite decades of work since FOXP2’s discovery, we still lack a clear picture of which regions shaped language evolution and how variation contributes to present-day phenotypic differences. Using a novel evolutionary stratified polygenic score approach in nearly 40,000 individuals, we find that Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs) are specifically associated with language but not general cognition. HAQERs evolved before the human–Neanderthal split, giving hominins increased binding of Forkhead and Homeobox transcription factors, and show balancing selection across the past 20,000 years. Remarkably, language variants in HAQERs appear more prevalent in Neanderthals and have convergently evolved across vocal-learning mammals. Our results reveal how ancient innovations continue shaping human language."
I enjoyed your book! It was a great overview of human evolution. The language question is, of course, a frustrating one. Your view, the infectious metaphor, came down in a similar place to David Krakauer's and Cormac McCarthy's view, which is discussed in "The Kekule Problem" essay (2017) by the latter. I recently wrote about that essay as well.
Perhaps I'm more of an adaptionists or just see less distinction between biological and social processes, but I'm more inclined, at the 10000 foot level, towards it coming about in a similar way to other complex traits.
I'm glad you found my review! Appreciate the engagement!
Tool-making should be considered a principal component of the selective pressures which led to language. According to the Beekman model of behaviors following brains, "after getting big brains and speaking language, we were then able to make tools." I see it in the opposite way: that tools precede language, but that tool-making creates communicative pressures. For example, explaining, gesturing, specialization, and general "memetic emulative ability."
The ability to see a tool, and copy that behavior, seems to mirror the ability to hear language and copy that phoneme. My conclusion, therefore, is that the development of bipedalism was necessary for language, since it enabled free hands, which enabled tool culture, which enlarged the structures needed for memetic emulation, which are the basis of language.
Yes, that's an important observation. Beekman does agree to an extent, making a similar point about the importance of bipedalism freeing the hands, though she also makes this relevant to childcare responsibilities:
Chimp young hang to the mother (obviously our nakedness is relevant here but is bound up with bipedalism), while human mothers are compelled to carry young (i.e. a greater burden).
Relatedly, one of my big issues is that her theory doesn't actually exclude there other vectors of selection (tool-making, reputation management/gossip, etc).
Great piece. Have a few comments
>Although I can’t claim that there is a bonafide trend, I’ve increasingly noticed a growing interest in revising our understanding of the role women in human evolution.
Could also be a regression to the mean of the last 150 years, where at times it was quite mainstream to say the human condition evolved among women. This reads as a “Mother Goddess” throwback to the 90s now, but plenty of victorians, nazis, and communists had their own reasons for thinking women would have invented/evolved real human culture first.
>Beekman reveals herself as one of the somewhat sophomoric and misanthropic members of her discipline
Unfortunately extremely common, sometimes bleeding into a reactionary urge to downplay human fitness supremacy. Some combination of our biology and culture clearly broke the game, no sense in denying that.
>Why based on these data alone, does Beekman think archaic and modern human couldn’t speak to each other despite many instances of interbreeding?
FWIW, Reich discussed the Gokhman et al paper about methylation, also citing it as possible evidence that only sapiens had real language.
>In my view, however, I think it is almost certainly the case that subjective experience preceded complex language in the course of evolution.
Agree on this. Subjective experience goes back very far. My model is that around 60,000 years ago Sapiens evolved language / stories / symbolic thought, and that was enough to take over the planet, but the story “I” was not completely evolved or culturally held in place until ~10,000 years ago (very roughly).
To your comment about it being wise to push back our estimates of various evolutionary milestones, on this issue, scientists have been too eager to say sapiens aren’t special and accept that once *any* uniquely human culture evolved the whole package was put together and set in stone.
>metaphorically arguing that language is a virus and the brains of children are a very susceptible and hospitable hosts.
I wonder what the phenomenology of that spreading would be like. Hmm…
Also, if that is your view of abilities as basic as language I think there is enough evidence of diffusion to say that the Sapient Paradox is probably explained by some cultural package spreading.
>Could also be a regression to the mean of the last 150 years, where at times it was quite mainstream to say the human condition evolved among women. This reads as a “Mother Goddess” throwback to the 90s now, but plenty of victorians, nazis, and communists had their own reasons for thinking women would have invented/evolved real human culture first.
My read is that the desire for feminist revisionism on evolution is the same as race revisionism in anthropology from Boas. The stories about our origins are thought to have potent influence on our politics (informed strongly by Hitler & WWII) so the stories need to conform to the desirable political sensibilities.
>FWIW, Reich discussed the Gokhman et al paper about methylation, also citing it as possible evidence that only sapiens had real language.
My understanding of Reich's tentative acceptance of this data was that human language likely showed more phonemic complexity rather than complex language being entirely inaccessible to Neanderthals. I think the many admixture events between archaic and modern humans would require a meaningful ability to communicate across this divide, especially if childcare was the reason why language evolved in the first place.
>To your comment about it being wise to push back our estimates of various evolutionary milestones, on this issue, scientists have been too eager to say sapiens aren’t special and accept that once *any* uniquely human culture evolved the whole package was put together and set in stone.
I think the modern human phenotype is special but that it took just took a long time to scale. I like the thought experiment of placing someone with a genius IQ (von Neumann) in a hunter-gatherer group (say we even let the genius come with modern knowledge and technology), what is the most they could get a band of 150 humans to do? To answer the rhetorical: It just took a long time to scale up.
Have you looked into Muthukrishna's Cultural Brain Hypothesis extension of Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis?
In his conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, Reich was discussing the paper in the context of what gave sapiens the edge to conquer the world. What did we have that Neanderthals didn't. I clip part of it here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/i/148733976/the-evolution-of-language
I'm sure he has nuanced opinions that cover both positions, just saying he has been more aggressive in his interpretation of that data.
>To answer the rhetorical: It just took a long time to scale up.
Hard to say a priori how long it would take to scale up, right? We can reject Chomsky-type proposals of a single generation, but what about 10,000 vs 1,000,000 years? If you assume heritability of 0.5 (or even 0.1), you don't need very much of a fitness advantage to scale up pretty fast. Groups 60,000 years apart could be extremely different. I'm hopeful ancient DNA will help ground these debates (shoutout to Akbari and Reich).
>Have you looked into Muthukrishna's Cultural Brain Hypothesis extension of Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis?
I have not, you find it more convincing? Interestingly Dunbar argues women would have been the vanguard of language in Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language.
>I'm sure he has nuanced opinions that cover both positions, just saying he has been more aggressive in his interpretation of that data.
Yes, I think I heard him discuss the Grokman 2020 paper one other place, and it seemed he's not all in on the finding, but yes, I do think he's sees it as part of the reason the modern human lineage persisted as other human lineages went extinct. However, I think he'd also believe that Neanderthals had human language. (side note: wonder what Razib's position would be?).
>Hard to say a priori how long it would take to scale up, right?
Right, the devil is really in the details, but I think based on what we know about forager life, "effective population" size from aDNA and population genetics, and looking at the many evidence points for how isolated and sparsely distributed Neanderthals were in Eurasia (as an interesting comparison too) that group size and cooperative dynamics were an important factor in human species survival/success.
>I have not, you find it more convincing? Interestingly Dunbar argues women would have been the vanguard of language in Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language.
Yes, so the SBH and CBH are really nice because especially the latter is an actual quantitative model that generalize across the animal kingdom and distinguishes between asocial and social species. I cite the Muthukrishna paper (PMID: 30408028 - also here's his thesis - https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.016651) in this piece (Read his book as well). He trained as a post-doc under Joseph Henrich.
I too am convinced by some of the claims about gossip vs freeriding/deception creating a bit of a social reputation management arms race in intelligence. Harari and Pinker have always loved this Dunbar argument too. Bennett, the AI startup guy who wrote a book on the history of intelligence under the guidance of some big scientists (notably LeDoux), also found the Dunbar stuff pretty convincing. Dunbar's number comes in for a lot of criticism now, especially after Gladwell popularization, but the broader social brain idea is very interesting and fits nicely into gene-culture coevolution ideas that have blossomed since.