Theory of How Humans Acquired language As Inferred by my Son

I suspect every parent worries about this at one point...

"When will he/she/it learn to talk??"

My wife and i have both been concerned about this developmental milestone. We have received conflicting reports about what the "normal" age is and i think it's just really up to the child. Part of me thinks it's probably a blessing, the current absence of coherent speech, 'cause i don't think i want the Boy repeating much of what we say at this time. We don't exactly edit the profanity from our speech.

This is not the point of this blog entry though. I want to explain my theory about how we, humans, acquired the capacity to speak. Like Piaget, i am basing my whole theory on observing my child (for those who aren't aware Piaget was an amazing development psychologist who based all of his theories on observing his own children, he has yet to be disproven and is widely accepted as being spot on - much of our understanding about childhood stages of development come from him).

There are some theories out there that suggest that how humans evolved can be viewed by how children develop, especially when they develop in utero. I think that this idea can be extrapolated to other aspects of human development.

So my theory is this...

Speech, and inevitably language, came about because humans needed to complain to others about something. Complaining was the impetus to the development of speech.

I mean think about it.

If you were a preliterate human ancestor and something happened like, i don't know you ate a bad mushroom (imo they all are bad but i digress...) and got the runs, wouldn't it make sense to develop the verbal capacity to complain about it to get some sympathy or some leaves? Or to warn others via complaint how bad the mushrooms are?

Or better yet, doesn't it make sense to complain about that sabertooth tiger that keeps eating your family members?

I think complaining was the first means of communication. I mean, if something is pretty nice or tasty, you really don't need to do much more than grunt approval and others will get the message (it works for me). You really don't need much more than that.

However, if something is unsatisfactory, you would really need to articulate this point so that another will get the message/point. You would need a) speech and b) language. Otherwise, you might get misrepresented and misunderstood with a grunt. Then again, a good disapproving grunt and a thwok on another's head would probably get the same result as a verbalized complaint too. Except that the thwokee might thwok the thwoker resulting a whole mess of thwokking going on.

Thus, verbalizing complaints probably resulted in less head trauma which in turn results in smarter bipeds. To clarify, the thwokees would probably not have enough sense to escape a hungry predator since their brainpan was damaged by a good thwok and thereby preventing their genetics from fully entering the collective evolutionary stream. Forces of evolution would favor those early humans that complained rather than those that went around thwokking and get thwokked in return.

Okay. Enough. Before you decide to thwok me.

I have developed this theory because i have observed that the only time my son talks is when he has a complaint (or what appears to be a moment of distress that needs to be verbalized). I should clarify. As of this moment, he does speak, not words but the babbling verbal gobble-dee-gook of protospeak, and at other times other than complaint. His first attempts to speak were complaints as a rsult of some form of unhappiness or discomfort. His verbalizations were to be noticed and have us notice his distress.

This is not to say that if he started with some positive verbalization (which leads me to ask how would we truly know) that we would have over looked it but that negative experiences are more likely to require relief or acknowledgement of some sort. For whatever reason (and i suspect that this is also why really clean unblemsied goodguys are boring), positivity tends to be bland and unexciting. Whereas, complaints, unhappiness, and the darker side tends to be more interesting and captures the attention quicker.

Perhaps, this adds another piece of validity to my theory and helps to explain it. Since complaining was the first articulated thought or experience by early man, we presently are more likely to pay more interest in the deeper and darker expressions of humans because it is an earlier, evolutionarily older aspect of our human natures.

Cognitive thought, consciousness resulted solely because of one early hominid's complaint.

Really makes me happy to be doing the kind of work i do that's for sure.