The Stories Stones Tell of Language and Its Evolution
Language origins remain shrouded in mystery. With little remaining from our earliest ancestors, language evolution researchers have turned to stone tools to learn about ancestral language capacities, as discussed in this chapter. Because inferior frontal areas of the brain, once thought specific to language, are now known to participate during manual motor tasks as well, technological-origin hypotheses propose that tool-making was a potential cause or contributor to the evolution of language. Cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to monitor regional brain activation patterns associated with tool-making processes are helping to investigate the potential evolutionary relationship between language and tool-making. These experiments have identified one area in the left dorsal pars opercularis portion of Broca’s area where language and stone tool-making functions rely on similar cognitive operations. A more general motor origin for language seems likely in other inferior frontal areas of the brain. Clearly, stone tools have stories to tell if we know how to listen.