Babel's Dawn. Edmund Blair Bolles

The many commenters who forced me into a wider perspective and taught me many things I needed to learn about language. And Laura Newman, who saved the blog by showing me a way to keep at it without going mad from exhaustion.

A CONFESSION

WHEN IT COMES to natural history, I prefer museums to books. It’s not that I don’t love books, but getting from the printed facts of natural history to their breathing truth can often be a bit of a slog, especially when compared with the way a museum sets the visitor down in front of fossils displayed in active positions or dioramas—stages with painted backdrops and three-dimensional figures—depicting lost worlds. Looking at those exhibits, the meaning of the facts pops out at you. So when I began work on my own volume about the natural history of speech origins, the idea of museum displays nestled easily into my head.

Babel’s Dawn is organized to help readers pretend they are strolling through a series of museum galleries filled with dioramas that display scenes from the origins of speech. It begins with the last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees (from about six million years ago) and proceeds on down to the first storytellers (a bit more than a hundred and fifty thousand years ago). Naturally, I have imagined a modern museum, and when visitors arrive in the entrance hall they are handed devices called audio guides, complete with headphones. Besides pretending that you are looking at scenes in dioramas, pretend that you are listening to an audio guide that provides the facts and ideas connecting the displays. It is that simple.

So let’s tour my natural history museum’s exhibition on the origins of speech . . .

ENTRANCE HALL: BECOMING DIFFERENT

LIKE ALL SCIENCE stories, this one begins with wonder. Over the centuries, many people have noticed an infinite chain of language acquisition. We learned to talk from our parents, who learned from their parents, who learned from their parents—but how did that chain begin? Asked in modern, Darwinian terms, we know that our ape ancestors did not speak, so there must have been a time when members of the human lineage began speaking without learning it from their parents. How did they do that?

Against a wall stands a wax figure of Samuel Johnson, famous as the author of the first great dictionary of the English language. He wears an eighteenth-century wig and a cheap frock coat. Behind him, written on the wall, is a quotation from one of his famous conversations.

Johnson, like many people, tried to explain the birth of language as a miracle, proposing that language began as a product of divine inspiration. The wall quotation reads:

A thousand, nay, a million children could not invent a language. While the organs are pliable, there is not understanding enough to form a language; by the time that there is understanding enough, the organs are become stiff. We know that after a certain age we cannot learn to pronounce a new language.

The argument makes sense. Children don’t have the brains to come up with language; adults don’t have the tongues. But it turns out that Johnson underestimated how creative groups of children can be.

Most languages spring from the abyss of time, the way French and Spanish stem from Latin, which descended from an old Italic language that was one of many offspring of the Indo-European tongue that had ancestors of its own. But there are a group of languages known as Creoles that are much more recent. They were

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