Book Reviews
Language : Gesture :: Evolution : Origin Armstrong, D. F., & Wilcox, S. E. (2007). The Gestural Origin of Language. New York: Oxford University Press. $22.95 Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-19-516348-3.
The book argued for a gestural origin of human languages. Culling evidence from studies in paleontology, primatology, neurology, signed languages, and writing, the authors presented the gradual evolution of languages. The development of brain bilaterality in early hominids about 4 million years ago enabled the use of hand– body gestures for referential signaling and meaning attribution. With flat pharynx and larynx in high position in the basicranium, they were incapable of speech. Vocalizations were produced with gestures. Gestures became embodied action iconic visible movements and governed visual representations. This communication system continued 3 million years ago among the Australopithecus who developed bipedalism, larger brain size, and thumb-opposing handedness and Homo erectus 2 million years ago with a still larger brain. With the emergence of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, brain size doubled, the neocortex and cerebellum were enlarged, the larynx moved from high position to a low position in the basicranium, and the pharynx became flexed. About 100,000 years ago, the FOXP2 gene that governs grammatical processing, vocal articulation, and facial and oral musculature movements was mutated. Consequently, vocalizations became speech. The instrumental, motivated, and embodied action visible gestures proceeded through lexicalization, classifierization, and grammatization processes to become decontextualized, conventionalized, digitized, doubly articulated, schematized, symbolic, analytical, and unmotivated spoken language governed by system-internal morphological and syntactical constructions. In addition, natural selection transformed multisensory synesthesia in gestures into unisensory hypertropism toward acousticism in spoken languages. The development of writing, with the advent of H. sapiens and late Neanderthals in Upper
Paleolithic era about 40,000 years ago, underwent similar paths. Evolution is a hypothesis, albeit unobservable and unverifiable. It is constructible only by either linear and additive extrapolation or constellationized and contextualized interpolation of evidence. The book extrapolated sources and modeled language evolution on cognitivism and hominid brain changes. Here, anthromorphism reigned in evolution theory and interpretation of evidence. An alternative hypothesis requires consideration: the evolution of language as bodily reconfigurations for communication based on contextual demands. Is evolution based on natural selection or tropism of mind–body communicative forms to coevolve with natural–social demands? As the authors mentioned but not demonstrated, the neurocognitive mechanisms, sociocultural organization, and communication skills coevolved. Hominid competition for resources altered bodily configurations, created differential body–nature tropisms, and generated different subspecies with intraspeciesspecific communication systems. Differential but intentional, symbolic, schematized, digitalized, and codified gestures and calls in chimpanzees’ grooming and other socializing behaviors in forests became speech, signs, and writing in human, agriculture-based societies. Parallelism in the evolution of signs, speech, and writing from gestures does not imply ancestry or linearity. Speech and language are not extensions of gesture and sign. Evolution is not additive but alteration of bodily communication configurations that tropized under different social–natural environments.
Ó The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
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Russell S. Rosen Teachers College Columbia University doi:10.1093/deafed/enn018 Advance Access publication on May 16, 2008
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