Modern Mind

language, a true mother tongue? We saw earlier that some palaeontologists believe that the Neanderthals died out about 28,000 years ago because they did not have language. Against that, Cavalli-Sforza points out that the region in our brains responsible for language lies behind the eye, on the left side, making the cranium slightly asymmetrical. This asymmetry is absent in apes but present in skulls
of Homo habilis
dated to 2 million years ago. Furthermore, our brain case ceased to grow about 300,000 years ago, and so on this basis it seems that language might be older than many palaeontologists think. 38 On the other hand, studies of the way languages change over time (a rate that is known, roughly) points back to between 20,000–40,000 years ago when the main superfamilies split. This discrepancy has not been resolved.
    Regarding the mother tongue, Cavalli-Sforza relies on Greenberg, who claims that there is at least one word that seems to be common to all languages. This is the root word
tik.
     
Family or Language
Forms
Meaning
Nilo-Saharan
tok-tek-dik
one
Caucasian
titi, tito
finger, single
Uralic
ik-odik-itik
one
Indo-European
dik-deik
to indicate/point
Japanese
te
hand
Eskimo
tik
index finger
Sino-Tibetan
tik
one
Austroasiatic
ti
hand, arm
Indo-Pacific
tong-tang-ten
finger, hand, arm
Na-dene
tek-tiki-tak
one
Amerind
tik
finger 39
     
    For the Indo-European languages, those stretching from western Europe to India, Greenberg’s approach has been taken further by Colin Renfrew, the Cambridge archaeologist who rationalised the effects of the carbon-14 revolution on dating. Renfrew’s aim, in
Archaeology and Language
(1987), was not simply to examine language origins but to compare those findings with others from archaeology, to see if a consistent picture could be arrived at and, most controversially, to identify the earliest homeland of the Indo-European peoples, to see what light this threw on human development overall. After introducing the idea of regular sound shifts, according to nation–
     
‘milk‘:
French
lait
Italian
latte
Spanish
leche
‘fact‘:
French
fait
Italian
fatto
Spanish
hecho
     
    Renfrew went on to study the rates of change of language and to consider what the earliest vocabulary might have been. Comparing variations in the use of key words (like
eye, rain,
and
dry),
together with an analysis of early pottery and a knowledge of farming methods, Renfrew examined the spread of farming through Europe and adjacent areas. He concluded that the central homeland for the Indo-Europeans, the place where the mother tongue, ‘proto-Indo-European,’ was located, was in central and eastern Anatolia about 6500 BC and that the distribution of this language was associated with the spread of farming. 40
    The surprising thing about all this is the measure of agreement between archaeology, linguistics and genetics. The spread of peoples around the globe, the demise of the Neanderthals, the arrival of humanity in the Americas, the rise of language, its spread associated with art and with agriculture, its link to pottery, and the different tongues we see about us today all fall into a particular order, the beginnings of the last chapter in the evolutionary synthesis.
    Against such a strong research/empirical background, it is not surprising that theoretical work on evolution should flourish. What
is
perhaps surprising is that writing about biology in the 1980s and 1990s became a literary phenomenon. A clutch of authors – biologists, palaeontologists, philosophers – wrote dozens of books that became best-sellers and filled the shelves of good bookshops, marking a definite change in taste, matched only by an equivalent development in physics and mathematics, which we shall come to in a later chapter. In alphabetical order the main authors in this renaissance of Darwinian studies were: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Pinker, Steven Rose, John Maynard Smith, and E. O. Wilson. The group was known collectively as the neo-Darwinists, and they aroused enthusiasm and hostility in equal measure: their books sold well, but Dawkins at one point, in 1998, was described as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain.’ 41 The message of the neo-Darwinists was twofold. One view was represented by Wilson, Dawkins, Smith and Dennett, the other by Eldredge, Gould, Lewontin and Rose. Wilson himself produced two kinds of books. There was first, as we have