The greatest tool ever invented? The beer mug? The melon baller? The crochet hook? None of the above, says Daniel Everett:
The greatest tool in the world is language. Without it there would be no culture, no literature, no science, no history, no commercial enterprise or industry. The genus Homo rules the Earth because it possesses language. But how and when did we build this kingdom of speech? And who is ‘we’? After all, Homo sapiens is just one of several species of humans that have walked the Earth. Does ‘we’ refer to our genus, Homo, or to our species, sapiens? To discover the answers to these questions, we need to travel back in time at least 1.9 million years ago to the birth of Homo erectus, as they emerged from the ancient process of primate evolution. Erectus had nearly double the brain size of any previous hominin, walked habitually upright, were superb hunters, travelled the world, and sailed to ocean islands. And somewhere along the way they got language. Yes, erectus. Not Neanderthals. Not sapiens. And if erectus invented language, this means that Neanderthals, born more than a million years later, entered a world already linguistic.
Daniel Everett, “Did Homo erectus speak?” at Aeon
Well, if Homo erectus invented language, we must intensify our search for that subhuman. In any proper Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman, right? Otherwise, we re playing a game of musical chairs where, when the music stops, there ARE actually enough chairs…
See also: Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness