Language evolution: How language was built and made to evolve

Today's mainstream research in language evolution leaves from the assumption that language is an exclusively human feature, a steady-state entity like our biological organs, and endeavors to discover the phylogenetic event that endowed us with this mental “organ” or the clinching moment language became possible.The fossil evidence from the development of central and peripheral speech organs provides, however, no support for the alleged existence of a fateful event that would have dubbed a speechless ancestor into a speech-vested mutant; instead, it outlines a gradual - be it by the nature of the archeological evidence staccato - development of speech organs from the hints detected on the endocranial casts of the most archaic member of the genus Homo to the full-blown apparatus of modern humans.The linguistic support of the mainstream approach is even more wanting. Far from being a steady-state accessory, language has evolved to become an ever more efficient instrument of thought and communication. This paper will argue that it started with implements improvised on the basis of a sensory mapping of the outside world and gradually developed into a set of mentally created alternatives properly crafted for linguistic operations.The evolution of writing from figurative hieroglyphs to symbolic letters provides a useful illustration. This is not to say that the evolution of language and the evolution of writing are related. The process is universal and can be seen just as well in the steady and sustained evolution of offensive weapons from the manually-cast sensory stones all the way to the artificially-propelled mentally-developed ballistic missiles. But the illustration that will be chosen here is that of the evolution of writing from figurative hieroglyphs to symbolic letters because, in addition to providing a useful illustration, it does also supply added support to the consolidation of the left hemisphere as the brain's linguistic center.