The Origin of Speech
What about the origin of speech? Given that all of the other forms of language are derived either directly or indirectly from speech, the question arises: Where did speech come from and why did it emerge? What information overload was it dealing with? I claim that speech arose not out of the need to improve communication but rather as a cognitive tool that allowed conceptualization, a skill that became necessary as hominid life became more complex. The complexity of hominid life increased slowly over hundreds of thousands of years with the following advancements, each of which entailed new cognitive skills:

manual praxic articulation including toolmaking and the control of fire;

social organization or the language of social interaction required to maintain and control fire and organize food sharing and large scale coordinated hunting;

pre-verbal mimetic communication that entails the use of gesture, hand signals, body language, and prosodic vocalization, which facilitated various aspects of social organization (Donald 1991).

The three pre-verbal cognitive developments listed above were, according to Donald, the cognitive laboratory in which the skills of generativity, representation, and communication developed and, hence, were the source of the cognitive framework for speech. Each entails some form of sequential learning and processing and, hence, following the ideas of Christiansen, would have served as pre-adaptations for speech.

According to Donald, these three cognitive skills allowed a rather sophisticated level of performance and intentional communication for pre-verbal hominids.

Individuals can perform a variety of difficult functions without language, without even the possibility of internal speech. The range of their cognitive competence is impressive: it includes intentional communication, mimetic and gestural representation, categorical perception, various generative patterns of action, and above all the comprehension of social relationships, which implies a capacity for social attribution and considerable communicative ability (166).

If mimetics that pre-dated speech provided an adequate system of communication, then one is left with the conclusion that the principal function of language and the reason for its emergence was conceptualization (Logan 2000b). Donald was the first to suggest this: