How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (9 page)

To this, we humans add language. It’s a kind of grooming at a distance and, in many ways, serves much the same kind of purpose. It allows us to make that all-important statement about commitment: ‘I find you interesting enough to waste time talking to.’ Forget all that highfa-lutin’ nonsense about Shakespeare and Goethe. Real conversations in the everyday world are simply plain honest grooming.

Of course, language allows us to go one step beyond mere signals of commitment. It allows us to exchange information. Monkeys and apes are restricted to direct observation when it comes to learning about who might make a good friend and who is unreliable, or who is going out with whom. But we can learn about these things at second and third hand, and that greatly extends our circle of social knowledge.

Take a listen to the conversation next to you. It will soon become clear that most of our conversations are concerned with social doings. Sometimes our own, sometimes other people’s. It’s the Harry-met-Sally-met-Susan syn-drome.

But nothing comes for free in evolution. Being able to exchange information on who-is-doing-what-with-whom inevitably allows us to use language for more nefarious
[Page 74]
purposes. In short, advertising should properly be accorded the title of the oldest profession. We are past masters of it. If you don’t believe me, listen more closely to that conversation.

There is, however, a curious asymmetry in the conversations of men and women. Harry, it seems, likes to talk about Harry, but Sally talks about Susan. Ah, you say, everyone’s stereotypes confirmed. Well, yes and no. There’s no smoke without fire, of course. But the really interesting question is why it should be like this.

Men and women’s preferred conversation topics are often radically different because they are playing rather different games. Listen carefully to what they actually say, and you soon realise that women’s conversations are pri-marily geared to servicing their social networks, building and maintaining a complex web of relationships in a social world that is forever in flux. Keeping up to date on everyone’s doings is as important as the implicit suggestion that you are enough a member of the in-group to be worth talking to. This is not tittle-tattle. It’s the very hub of the social merry-go-round, the foundation on which society itself is built.

In contrast, men’s conversations seem to be geared as much to advertising as anything else. They talk about themselves or they talk about things they claim to know a lot about. It’s a kind of vocal form of the peacock’s tail. Male peacocks hang about on their mating territories and display their brilliant tails whenever a female hoves into view. The peahens wander from one male to another, choosing among the males on the basis of their trains.

Humans, it seems, do all this vocally. Like the peacocks that suddenly raise their tails when a peahen is near, men
[Page 75]
switch into advertising mode when women are present.

Have a listen to the same man when he is talking only to other men and compare it with what he talks about when women are present. When there are women present, his conversational style changes dramatically. It becomes more showy, more designed to stimulate laughter as a response. But, in addition, you’ll find that technical topics and other forms of ‘knowledge’ become more intrusive. It’s competitive and it’s a manifesto. Politics is the name of the game. Language is indeed a many-splendoured thing.

The American anthropologist Dean Falk has suggested that language might have come about through mothers singing to their babies. That peculiar form of speech known as
motherese
which women (in particular) seem to use so naturally when talking to infants has many of the hallmarks of music – a simple rhythmicity, a strikingly exaggerated sing-song intonation that can rise and fall two whole octaves, and a pitch that is significantly higher than normal speech. Next time you overhear a mother talking to her baby, listen closely. You’ll be listening to distant echoes of the past. Oh, and don’t forget to watch the baby. This unique form of music is very calming for it, and babies seem to find it very attractive and soothing. It stimulates smiling. It’s the magic of endorphins again, and their role in bonding.

But motherese has much more important effects than just calming baby. It can dramatically affect the speed with which a baby reaches its developmental milestones. Marilee Monnot, then a postgraduate student in biolog-
[Page 76]
ical anthropology at Cambridge University, observed fifty-two mothers and their newborn babies during the first year of the baby’s life. She found that those mothers who used more motherese had babies that grew faster and reached the early developmental milestones (like smiling) more quickly than those who used less. That’s quite scary.

Monkey and ape mothers do not croon to their babies. They don’t even rock them. It seems to be something that is peculiar to humans. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see how motherese might have got going, though exactly when that might have happened is a tad more difficult to say. If humming soothes baby, and a less fractious baby is more healthy, then there is likely to have been very considerable selection pressure on mothers to do this kind of thing. But why us humans, and not, say, our great ape cousins? The answer surely has something to do with the fact that human babies are born around a whole year premature compared to what we would expect for an ape or monkey of our brain size (I’ll have more to say on this later). By comparison, ape babies can pretty much look after themselves. Human babies need an awful lot more attention, and don’t really get to the same stage of development as a newborn chimpanzee baby until they reach their first birthday. Since a whole lot more work has to be done by the human baby’s long-suffering parent, a mechanism that quietens and soothes a fractious baby must have been all the more necessary in our lineage.

If so, then perhaps this gives us a clue as to when it might have evolved. If it was a response to the radical change in birthing pattern that resulted from the last big
[Page 77]
upward shift in brain size, then we can perhaps point to the appearance of archaic humans around half a million years ago. This might well have coincided with the origins of music. Motherese might have been the precursor of music, or it might have been the stepping stone between music and language.

Motherese isn’t really language. Although it often does consist of words, it doesn’t have to. Often, it is just nonsense syllables. It shares much with nursery rhymes – rhythm, rhyme and alliteration.
Hickory, dick-ory, dock
. . . That in itself suggests that it long predates the evolution of language. It is all so much more like wordless singing, or humming – pure music. In this, it shares a great deal with sea shanties. And it also shares a great deal in common with that most extraordinary and unique form of vocal music, the waulking songs (
òrain luaidh
in Gaelic) of the women of the Outer Hebrides. Part just nonsense syllables, part witty – often raunchy – reflections on lives coloured by poverty and hard work, and not infrequently by tragedy, these extraordinary songs have been sung for centuries by the women as they stretch and soften the newly woven tweed round a kitchen table. Passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next, they are a remarkable and unique tradition. I wonder if they don’t represent the very first kinds of situations when language was used – by women around the campfire, or out foraging for fruits and tubers. There is something about synchronised singing that seems especially good at triggering the release of endorphins: many voices make light work.
[Page 78]

In the end, of course, language evolved to allow us to integrate a large number of social relationships. And the way it does this is by allowing us to exchange information about other individuals who are not present. In other words, by talking to one person, we can find out a great deal about how other individuals are likely to behave, how we should react to them when we actually meet them and what kinds of relationships they have with third parties. All these things allow us to co-ordinate our social relationships within a group more effectively. And this is likely to be especially important in the large, dispersed groups that are characteristic of modern humans.

This would explain our fascination for social gossip in the newspapers, and why gossip about relationships accounts for an overwhelming proportion of human conversations. Even conversations in such august places as university coffee rooms tend to swing back and forth between academic issues and gossip about individuals. To get some idea of how important gossip is, we monitored conversations in a university refectory, scoring the topic at thirty-second intervals. Social relationships and personal experiences accounted for about seventy per cent of conversation time. About half of this was devoted to the relationships or experiences of third parties (people not present).

But since males tend to talk more about their own relationships and experiences, whereas females tend to talk most about other people’s, this might suggest that language evolved in the context of social bonding between females. Most anthropologists have assumed that it
[Page 79]
evolved in the context of male–male relationships, during hunting for example. The suggestion that female–female bonding, based on knowledge of the relationships of other individuals, was more important fits much better with views about the structure of nonhuman primate societies where relationships between females are all-important.

That conversations allow us to exchange information about people who are not present is vitally important. It allows us to teach others how to relate to individuals they have never seen before, or to handle difficult situations before they have to face them. Combined with the fact that language also makes it easy to categorise people into types, we can learn how to relate to classes of individuals rather than being restricted to single individuals as primates are when grooming. We can agree to give types of individuals special markers, such as dog collars, white lab coats or large blue helmets, which allow us to behave appropriately towards them even though we have never met before. Without that knowledge, it would take us days to work out the basis of a relationship.

Classifications and social conventions allow us to broaden the network of social relationships by making networks of networks, and this in turn allows us to create very large groups indeed. Of course, the level of the relationship is necessarily rather crude but at least it allows us to avoid major social faux pas at the more superficial levels of interaction when we first meet someone we don’t know personally. Significantly, when it comes to really intense relationships that are especially important to us, we invariably abandon language and revert to that old-fashioned primate form of direct interaction – mutual mauling.
[Page 80]

What we seem to have here, then, is a theory for the evolution of language that also seems to account for a number of other facets of human behaviour. It explains why gossip about other people is so fascinating; it explains why human societies are so often hierarchical; it predicts the small size of conversation groups; it meshes well with our general understanding of why primates have larger brains than other mammals; and it agrees with the general view that language only evolved with the appearance of modern humans,
Homo sapiens
.

What it does not explain, of course, is why our ancestors should have needed to live in groups of about 150. It is unlikely that this has anything to do with defence against predators (the main reason why most nonhuman primates live in groups) because human groups far exceed the sizes of all other primate groups. But it might have something to do with the management or defence of resources, particularly dispersed resources such as water holes that nomadic hunter-gatherers might have had to depend on at certain times of the year.

Language is also crucial for one of our most peculiar activities – story-telling. It is something that humans all around the world do and love, and surely have done ever since time immemorial. It is not just a bit of old gossip, for stories told around the campfire are imbued with ritual and often have a very formal structure. Many are incredibly old, such as the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata, written around two thousand years ago, or the stories contained in the books of the Old Testament or the
[Page 81]
Bhagavadgita that were composed some five hundred years earlier, just a few centuries after Homer’s great epic poems the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Some of the stories told by Australian Aboriginals living along the south coast of the continent appear to be even more ancient: they are said to contain surprisingly accurate descriptions of the landscape on the sea floor of the Bass Strait that separates Tasmania from the Australian mainland – a land surface that was last exposed as dry land during the Ice Age that ended twelve thousand years ago.

So why should we be so fond of stories?

Well, for one thing, many such stories are origins stories – they tell us where we came from, and how we came to be the way we are. They tell us about community, they create a sense of belonging for us.

Shared knowledge itself is a good marker of community membership. That you know immediately what I mean when I observe that silly mid-on dropped the catch inexorably marks us out as belonging to the same community, the community of those who play or follow cricket. By virtue of that simple fact, we can be sure that we share enough in common to be willing to exchange favours should that ever be necessary. We have a common world view, and by implication subscribe to a common set of rules about how one should behave. It probably reflects the fact that, in our deep past, people who shared such knowledge lived together, and were almost certainly related to each other. So, discovering that we share eso-teric knowledge still seems to create an instant bond between us, sets us apart from the rest of the common herd. That may be one reason why we are so fond of creating technical jargon – it sets us apart as special, a shad-
[Page 82]
owy secret cabal that knows the innermost secrets of the universe. There’s nothing like a good secret.