Drawing on convergent work in a broad range of disciplines, this article uses the tipping point paradigm to frame a new account of how early human ancestors may have first broken free from, as Bickerton calls it, the “prison of animal communication.” Under building pressure for an enhanced signaling system capable of supporting joint attentional-intentional activities, a cultural tradition of disambiguated indexical pointing (a finger point disambiguated by a facial expression, vocalization, or other gesture), combined with increasingly sophisticated mindreading circuitry (...) and prosocial tendencies, may have sparked the first in the series of biocultural explosions that led from a simple protolanguage to fully modern human language. This account successfully integrates at least ten other competing hypotheses, and is shown to pass nine important tests that have been proposed for language origin scenarios of its type. (shrink)

The early Pleistocene hunt scene was instant: when an antelope jerked in the water edge, the first “drivers” of the hunt were already in motion; the moment of outburst after a long ambush lasted less than second. The sudden hunt movements were typical of every prey-abundant landscape since even earlier geological periods. The analysis of Laetoli footprints made by our evolutionary ancestors more than three millions years ago indicates that in a randomly chosen moment, the landscape was full of animals (...) of different species. The language used in the attack moment has to be agitative, only vowels in clausure between two consonants. During the process of further development, those consonants became more and more similar to delimitators, the borders where intrasemiotic realities translate extrasemiotic environment. Speech is an old Paleolithic tool for directing hunters to the useful positions. It was rather an instrument of a leader than grooming “clicks” of kin’s females. (shrink)