The archaeologist Lawrence Barham and the linguist Daniel Everett argued in 2020 that language is at least a million years old and can be seen in the stone tools of Homo erectus. Defining language as communication by symbols, not by complex grammar, they read the standard shapes of handaxes, the planning shown by stored tools and the early crossing of seas as signs of shared symbols. They call the claim controversial themselves, and it is disputed; for Therapeutic Shamanism its most striking evidence is that people who still make stone tools treat the stone as a living being.
Who are Lawrence Barham and Daniel Everett? #
Lawrence (Larry) Barham is a professor in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, where he leads a project on the deep roots of human behaviour. At Kalambo Falls in Zambia his team found two logs shaped and joined with stone tools at least 476,000 years ago, the oldest known wooden structure.1
Daniel Everett, born in California in 1951, is a linguist and professor of sociology at Bentley University in Massachusetts. In 1977 he went as a missionary linguist to a village of the Pirahã, hunter-gatherers on the Maici river in the Brazilian Amazon who fish from canoes, hunt, gather fruit and nuts and grow a little manioc, and he lived and worked among them for many years.2 His conclusion that their language lacks recursion, the embedding of one phrase inside another that Noam Chomsky’s account of language treats as universal, started a long public dispute. His books include Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (2008) and How Language Began (2017), in which he proposes that Homo erectus invented language.2 See Who is Noam Chomsky, and what does linguistics say about how language shapes thought?
What did they argue? #
That the origins of language “can be detected one million years ago, if not earlier”, in the archaeological record of Homo erectus, with language defined as “communication based on symbols rather than grammar”.3 Everything rests on that definition. In Everett’s scheme the simplest grammar puts words in a linear order, and that is enough to carry subtle and abstract meaning; a second kind adds hierarchical structure, and recursion is a later and non-essential addition. So there was never a halfway ‘protolanguage’, and the first languages were simply languages.3
How can a stone tool show language? #
Through the theory of signs of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who distinguished three kinds. An icon resembles what it stands for; an index is connected to it, as smoke is to fire; a symbol is linked to it only by agreement within a group. Barham and Everett point out that the standard forms of Acheulean handaxes and cleavers “bear no inherent relationship to their functions”. The shapes are conventions, kept by shared agreement, which makes them symbols.4
Several other lines of evidence point the same way for them. The modern handaxe maker Karl Lee, quoted in a footnote to the paper, says that teaching the finer points of knapping, where a millimetre on an edge decides whether a piece succeeds or breaks, would be difficult without at least a simple language. Stores of tools and raw stone left for later use show planning for a future that has not yet happened. And the settlement of islands in South-east Asia some 800,000 years ago meant crossing the sea, which they take to need more coordinated planning than gesture can manage.4
What do tools have to do with relationship? #
A great deal, in the examples they gather to show that tools carry meaning beyond use. The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote of the Nuer, pastoralists of what is now South Sudan as he described them, that their few possessions are “chains along which social relationships run”, and the simpler a material culture, the more relationships pass through it. Among the Pirahã a man uses the hunting bow, his wife makes the bowstring, and the finished bow stands for their union. And the Gamo, horticultural communities in Ethiopia who are among the last makers of stone tools, regard their tool-stone as “a named living and social being”, with a life history that mirrors that of the person who works it.5 Even the most practical things people make, then, sit inside living relationships.
Is the claim accepted? #
No; it sits well outside the consensus. The authors call it “This controversial claim” in their own abstract, and say that they argue for language beyond what most archaeologists accept as evidence of symbols.6 They are also open about the limits of what stones can say. The forms may have held meaning for the people who made and used them, “but we cannot know the culturally specific meanings of the signs”.7
The South African linguist Rudolf Botha, emeritus professor of general linguistics at the University of Stellenbosch, has examined one strand of their case closely and finds it unsound. He argues that the evidence does not show that Homo erectus had to build boats or rafts to reach the islands, since natural rafting is a likelier explanation, and that the seafaring argument “cannot be used to build a strong case” for language.8 Their paper appeared before Botha’s critique, and no reply from them to it has been found. Their case did not rest on the sea crossings alone; they set them beside the handaxe forms, the teaching of skills and the caching of tools, and in their own words extending language to Homo erectus does not deny the achievements of our own species but places them “in a broader evolutionary time frame”.7
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In two places, and they need to be kept apart. The first is the story of how humans came to lose their way. The early human ancestors, Homo erectus among them, were social apes like our living relatives, forming alliances, deceiving, bargaining, bonding and quarrelling. Then something else happened, and that was complex language. When is far from settled; estimates for anything like a modern language run from around 150,000 to around 50,000 years ago, with some form of proto-language likely before that.9 Barham and Everett place language far earlier and need no proto-language at all, so the two accounts differ on dates and on what counts as language, and both stand here as they are.
What matters in the teaching is what complex language did. It brought abstract thought, stories, myths and belief systems, and with them the ability to believe things that are not true and to lose our way. That is why animist peoples looked for guidance to the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer who do not lose their way, and why the tribes needed shamans. It is the first stretch of a long, slow fall.9 Humans are also the most inventive of Animals, and the ancestors’ skill with flint, bone, fire and fibre belongs to that same restless inventiveness.10
The second connection is the Gamo stone. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit and so everything is conscious, the Stone People included, even though Westerners struggle to recognise consciousness in rocks.11 The Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer are the oldest and wisest of the Peoples, and humans the youngest.12 The Gamo view of their tool-stone as a named living being parallels what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Stone People.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In what language is for. Barham and Everett’s question is when humans began to share symbols, and their argument treats language as the great human achievement. In Therapeutic Shamanism language is a mixed gift. It carries culture and teaching, and it also lets us build a world of stories that can separate us from things as they are. Shamanic journeying tries to go beyond language, into a deeper reality met through sensation, imagery and metaphor, and Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this rarely speak, so it matters to pay attention to what they do and bring to attention, and to its significance.13 See What did Jerrold Katz say about animist sentences as nonsense?
