social vs. general purpose language
He argues that the language of early humans, pre-homo sapiens, was exclusively a social language. They used language to send and receive social information, to establish pecking orders and loyalties, etc, rather than using language for subjects such as tool-use or hunting.
With larger group sizes language was an effective means of building social ties; much more effective than grooming, which is the staple form of sociability for apes, that’s the way they maintain some kind of group cohesion. Mithen argues very persuasively that this social language, at some point, gets transformed into a general purpose language.
It’s only when language starts acting as a way of delivering information about the world other than the social world, that we’re able to really start thinking about our own thought processes. He says that, as a result of that, the whole of human behaviour became pervaded with the flexibility and the creativity that characterises modern humans.
Because the real difficulty, if you understand evolution, is that things change very slowly. But here you have this explosion. There must have been a small change in our evolutionary past that allowed language – a social language – to suddenly become a general purpose language, Mithen argues.
