The History of Language and Writing

by Christopher Dewdney

Abstract
Literacy – meaning the ability to speak, read, and write a language – first appeared on our planet about six thousand years ago. Over the past decade, new neurolinguistic anatomical evidence as well as recent discoveries in ethnoarcheology have given us a much clearer picture of its origins than ever before.

The Rise of Literacy
The physical capability of speech is absent in all animals except birds and modern humans. It has been established that vocal sounds sufficiently complex to produce language can only be achieved if the larynx is positioned relatively low in the neck, as it is in humans and some species of birds. The lower positioned larynx elongates the pharynx and gives it the ability to produce speech. Pre-humans acquired this physiological feature as a consequence of their upright posture more than a million years ago, though it wasn’t used for speaking until much more recently in the geological time scale.

But having the vocal equipment to produce language doesn’t automatically confer the ability to speak. Without the impetus of interpersonal communication, a pharynx is like a violin without a musician. Although certain birds, notably the African gray parrot, possess both the ability to speak and to understand certain words, even African gray parrots can only imitate, or at best, associate a limited series of words within a given context. Human language is much more complex than that, and a sufficiently complex brain, re-wired by evolution to handle abstract concepts, is needed to produce what we call speech.