The Mother Tongue Read Free Page B

into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.
    Other mammals have no contact between their airways and esophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn’t in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months—curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.
    According to studies conducted by Philip Lieberman at Brown University, Neanderthal man was physiologically precluded from uttering certain basic sounds such as the /ē/ sound of bee or the /oo/ sound of boot. His speech, if it existed at all, would have been nasal-sounding and fairly imprecise—and that would no doubt have greatly impeded his development.
    It was long supposed that Neanderthal man was absorbed by the more advanced Homo sapiens. But recent evidence indicates that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in the Near East for 30,000 years without interbreeding—strong evidence that the Neanderthals must have been a different species. It is interesting to speculate what would have become of these people had they survived. Would we have used them for slaves? For sport? Who can say?
    At all events, Neanderthal man was hopelessly outclassed. Not only did Homo sapiens engage in art of an astonishingly high quality, but they evinced other cultural achievements of a comparatively high order. They devised more specialized tools for a wider variety of tasks and they hunted in a far more systematic and cooperative way. Whereas the food debris of the Neanderthals shows a wide variety of animal bones, suggesting that they took whatever they could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sapiens show that they sought out particular kinds of game and tracked animals seasonally. All of this strongly suggests that they possessed a linguistic system sufficiently sophisticated to deal with concepts such as: “Today let’s kill some red deer. You take some big sticks and drive the deer out of the woods and we’ll stand by the riverbank with our spears and kill them as they come toward us.” By comparison Neanderthal speech may have been something more like: “I’m hungry. Let’s hunt.”
    It may be no more than an intriguing coincidence, but the area of Cro-Magnon’s cave paintings is also the area containing Europe’s oldest and most mysterious ethnic group, the Basques. Their language, called Euskara by its speakers, may be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues. No one can say. What is certain is that Basque was already old by the time the Celts came to the region. Today it is the native tongue of about 600,000 people in Spain and 100,000 in France in an area around the Bay of Biscay stretching roughly from Bilbao to Bayonne and inland over the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Its remoteness from Indo-European is indicated by its words for the numbers one to five: bat, bi, hirur, laur, bortz. Many authorities believe there is simply no connection between Basque and any other known language.
    One of the greatest mysteries of prehistory is how people in widely separated places suddenly and spontaneously developed the capacity for language at roughly the same time. It was as if people carried around in their heads a genetic alarm clock that suddenly went off all around the world and led different groups in widely scattered places on every continent to create languages. Even those who were cut off from the twenty or so great