Neander Taal

Neander Taal
VPRO Noorderlicht / 25 min / 07-02-1999
Hoe oud is taal? Ruim honderd jaar geleden werd deze vraag taboe verklaard door de Societe Linguistique in Parijs. Inmiddels zijn er voldoende vondsten en theoriën om de vraag weer op te pakken. Gesprekken met psycholoog Bill Noble, paleo-antropologe Lynne Schepartz en neuro-evolutionist Terrence Deacon. Uitkomst: taal is zo oud als de mensheid.

tekst van de uitzending:

ALINK=”#F30B0B”> VPRO NOORDERLICHT – MONTAGE
AFLEVERING ‘NEANDER TAAL’
UITZENDING 07 FEBRUARI 1999
DOOR JOS WASSINK

OPENINGSSCENE: KLAAGMUUR IN JERUZALEM.
Mannen prevelen gebeden en zijn in hun rituelen verdiept.

COMMENTAAR:
“‘IN DEN BEGINNE WAS HET WOORD’.
Een onderzoekende geest vraagt zich dan af: WANNEER was het woord? Met andere woorden: hoe oud is taal eigenlijk?”

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ
PALEO-ANTROPOLOGE, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI:
Over 100 years ago, the French Linguistic Society said that it was impossible to really determine when language began. So, we shouldn’t even discuss it at all. But recently, we’ve had the good fortune to make many archeological discoveries that give us information about the origin of language.

RIJER LANGS RECONSTRUCTIE VAN OERMENSEN
TITEL: NEANDER TAAL

COMMENTAAR: Eén van de manieren om de oorsprong van taal te onderzoeken is het bestuderen van archeologische vondsten. Psycholoog Bill Noble en archeololoog Iain Davidson kozen voor deze aanpak. Wij spraken Bill Noble tijdens zijn bezoek aan het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden.

LOOPJE LANGS OPSTELLING OERMENSEN

DR. BILL NOBLE
SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND:
It’s true that language spoken leaves no traces. So you have to think about how language exists. And of course it exists in virtue of the fact that we use communicative signs, the words of any spoken language as symbols. In other words, as we speak to eachother we’re conscious of the meanings of the signs we’re uttering. And that’s the symbolic quality of what we’re doing. So the archeological evidence is other signs or symbols, left as a visual record.

LOOPJE LANGS VITRINES

DR. BILL NOBLE:
In this museum there are arrowheads which presumably were attached to shafts of some kind in order to be used for hunting. And the very fact that one object was attached to another suggests objects being made according to a deliberate plan. In other words, the makers had some kind of image in mind that they were working towards as they were making the object. Those kinds of objects are not older than 15.000 years. There are probably similar objects that are perhaps twice that age, but I’m not aware of objects of that kind that are older than about 35.000 years before present.

COMMENTAAR:
Oudere voorwerpen zoals stenen bijlen zien Noble en Davidson niet als uitingen van symbolisch denken of gepland gedrag. Wel zijn er indirecte aanwijzingen uit vroeger tijden. De eerste kolonisatie van Australië IS zo’n aanwijzing.

DR. BILL NOBLE:
The first signs of colonisation of Australia is roundabout 50 to 55.000 years. And it’s very clear that people could not have got to Australia except by travelling in some kind of ocean going craft and anything like that, to build a boat or a raft or whatever it was that took them there is precisely the same order of object as the arrowheads and arrowshafts, and so our argument is that that’s the earliest evidence for symbol based behaviour. If you then extrapolate the colonisation of South Asia from Europe, the discovery of the symbolic nature of signs could be somewhere between 100 to 70.000 years before the present.

EXT. RIJKSMUSEUM VAN OUDHEDEN. LEIDEN

COMMENTAAR:
Volgens Noble en Davidson is taal dus maximaal honderdduizend jaar oud. Dat komt mooi uit, want dat is ook de leeftijd van de moderne mens Homo Sapiens. Maar de Amerikaanse paleo-antropologe Lynne Schepartz gelooft niets van zo’n nette verdeling.

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
The idea that language would begin at 100.000 years ago is really linked to the idea that language begins with the origin of modern humans, which many people would date to exactly that period of time. I think the two things, the origin of language and the origin of modern humans, are completely separate issues. The whole idea should be decoupled, separated. And some of the evidence we have on why the origin of language and the origin of modern humans are not the same thing, are to be found in the Carmel Caves here.

TOERISTISCH GROEPJE

COMMENTAAR:
Het Carmel-gebergte in het noorden van Israel is een bekende plek voor vondsten uit de prehistorie. Tot op de huidige dag wordt er gegraven onder verantwoordelijkheid van de universiteit van Haifa.
Maar de meest spectaculaire vondst dateert van 1983. Lynne Scheparzt deed er toen de vondst van haar leven.

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
I’m a paleoanthropologist and most paleoanthropologists dream during their life of finding the remains of ancient humans. A fossil to us is one of the greatest achievements in our lifes. And when I was a young student back in 1983 I was invited by my friends and now collegues Ofar Ben Yusef and Bernard Vandermeersch to join their excavations at Kebara cave.
I was asked to dig in a very deep testpit in the center part of the cave.I think most people didn’t want to work in that testpit. It was dark, dirty, didn’t smell to good and you had to climb several ladders to get there.
I came upon one small human bone. Actually a bone from the hand. And I wasn’t sure if it was a fossil bone or not. But it looked like it possibly could be.
My instructions were: clean up this area, we’ll take a picture and document where this human bone comes from and as I started to do that, I took a brush and started in the far corner, furthest away from me and all of a sudden I saw, right in front of me a complete row of teeth, and then I knew I had something else.
Slowly, slowly we began to clean up this area, and most of a complete Neanderthal skeleton was found there. In fact, I think it’s the most beautiful Neanderthal ever discovered, but I have I a bias.

OPHALEN KIST (UNITEIT TEL-AVIV)

PROF YOEL RAK,
UNIVERSITY OF TEL-AVIV:
– Here it is.

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
– Great
– You’re familiar with this one heh?
– A little bit, yes. Terrific. And then just the layers come out? OK great.
So what we’re going to be working with are the materials in the top layer. The hyoid and the mandable. The hyoid is in this small box here.
– Can you show us?
See how tiny it is.
– And where is it’s place normally?
Normally when it was found it would be in this region of the througt right here, and in living humans it’s deep in this area here. You couldn’t actually se it or feel it in a living human because of all the tissues and muscles that are overlying it.
We can see from this that Neanderthals had a modern like speech aparatus. Quite surprising conclusion for many people who had long argued that Neanderthals would be incapable of modern speech, that they would be different in their ability to form sounds. Particularly vowel sounds. But instead we see that all of the possibilities are here. Not, as had been argued earlier, that language is the domain of modern humans, but in fact very clearly it was within the capacity of Neanderthals as well.

COMMENTAAR:
Maar als Neandertalers al konden praten, hoe ver terug ligt dàn het begin van taal?
Aanwijzingen voor nog vroegere taal zijn ook in Israel gevonden, en dat is goed beschouwd geen toeval.

AUTORIT

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
Israel is so important because when you think about it’s strategic position, not only in the world today but also in the past, very important place. What is it? It’s the connecting bridge between Africa and Asia and Europe. To get to either of these regions from Africa, you have to come through here. So it should come as no surprise that some of our earliest sites out of Africa are found right here in Israel.

VANUIT AUTO DOOR VOORUIT

COMMENTAAR:
In 1981 werd op de Golan hoogvlakte een prehistorisch beeldje gevonden. De vondst veroorzaakte een groot tumult omdat het geïnterpreteerd werd als de vroegste aanwijzing voor symbolisch denken. Het zogeheten Berekhet Ram beeldje wordt bewaard in het Israelmuseum in Jeruzalem.

WATERGOTEN

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
I’ve come to the Israel Museum today to take a look at one of the most important pieces of evidence we have for the origin of language, it’s a tiny figurine, it’s actually the earliest female figurine ever discovered and we’re going to meet with the discoverer of the piece, my friend professor Naama Goren-Inbar.

ONTMOETING EN DOOR CATACOMBEN

PROF. NAAMA GOREN-INBAR
DPT. OF ARCHEOLOGY, HEBREW UNIVERSITY:
People look at it as a symbol, because it’s a symbol made to show a concept or a life think or some kind of belief. And if it’s a symbol, it means that they had a language and people doubted if language was so ancient or wether it was more recent. And that stemmed the whole argument about the nature of the find and it’s meaning.

BEELDJE PAKKEN UIT KAST

DEBBI HERSHMAN,
CURATOR ISRAEL MUSEUM:
It might be difficult to film here.

COMMENTAAR:
Het zwaarbewaakte beeldje is maar liefst 230.000 jaar oud en zou daarmee verreweg het oudste kunstwoorwerp zijn dat ooit gevonden is.

PROF. NAAMA GOREN-INBAR:
The head is here and there’s a groove that delineates the divison between the head here and the body. And when you flip it over, you can see the same thing: the head is over here and there are two tiny little grooves which delineate the arms.
– Can you trace them out?
Yes you can but it’s very weathered.
And then when you look at the side of it you can see the head with a very deep groove, you can see the grooves for the arm and yu can see the natural protrusion assumed to be the breast of the woman and ofcourse the very detailed study undertaken by professor Marschak, he was able to prove through a detailed analysis that actually some parts of this were treated and it’s not just a simplified object which they found.

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
I think it’s wonderfull, it’s real exciting to see this, to see it up close. I’ve read about it, I saw it when it was on display in the museum, but to actually see it here… I think it’s wonderfully convincing, it’s exactly what I would have HOPED to have found for that time period.

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ
(INTERVIEW)
This tiny, tiny figurine, our first image of the female body, also gives us so much information about the early human ability to think symbolically. And that’s all part of language. You need to be able to think symbolically, you need to have the structures of the brain and then along with that also the vocal apparatus which is capable of communicating about the symbolic thoughts of these people. So those two things put together give us this very important archeological evidence for language which long precedes 100.000 years ago.

BEZOEKERS VERLATEN TERREIN CARMEL CAVES

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
In my opinion, the origin of language.. we would know probably begin to place it certainly over one million years ago, perhaps with the very beginning of our own biological grouping, the genus Homo. And early dates for the genus Homo may go back even closer to two million years or more in age. At that time period however, some of our best arguments are dependent of changes in the structure of the brain and even changes changes in the sizes of the brain that we first see at those time periods.

COMMENTAAR:
De evolutie van de hersenen is diepgaand onderzocht door neuroloog en antropoloog Terrence Deacon. In fossiele schedels zocht en vond hij sporen van geestelijke ontwikkeling. Wij spraken hem in het Groninger Museum.

PROF TERRENCE DEACON:
DPT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, BOSTON UNIVERSITY
I think that we see in the fossil record three things happening at once that tell us that some radical revolution in cognition was taking place about 2 to 2,5 million years ago. What we see in a period of 2,5 million years ago and a little after or more recent than 2 million years ago is the first appearance of stone tools, tools used clearly to cut meat. At the same time we see all these things, we see the brain begins it’s enlargement away from typical primate patterns.
As the brains enlarged, on of the things is that the proportions of the parts have changed. And we’ve recently discovered how these proportions have changed and one of the major areas that has taken advantage of this is the very front part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex. It appears to play a very significant role in analysing symbolic relationships, but also in planning and things we might call insight.
This is important of course in very special learning situations. Often times you have to be flexible, you have to adjust, to shift your attention or your line of thought from one thing to another. I think that’s crucial for using symbols.

BIM-BAM KERKLOKKEN

PROF TERRENCE DEACON:
I think it’s the case in all species that we know of that the most elaborate communication is usually about mate choice. Making decisions about reproduction, because that’s where evolution settles it’s bottom line. That’s the genes that make it into the next generation.
So I think it’s logical to think that the first demand on symbolic communication in human also came around evolution. And we do one thing that’s totally unusual in the natural world: we engage in reproduction that’s based upon agreements.
Other animals fight it out or assess each other in detail in courtships. We still do that but we make our final decisions and control them socially by virtue of these abstract relationships: things that you can’t put your finger on.
Something about promise, about the future, about who will take care of who, who will mate with whom, and who won’t mate with whom.
Those are still the most elaborate rituals in our societies. And it wouldn’t surprise me, in fact I’m convinced that they must have been the core events around which the first symbols evolved. Making those agreements about reproduction, today we would call it marriage.
It involves whole groups, everyone you know, everyone in both families, everyone who could possibly be involved and you act out every promise. It’s not just a promise, but you have to do something, you have to act it through.
All of this is part of making it more real. Making something that is very hard to grasp: the future, the promise, the obligation, more concrete and easier to grasp.

PROF TERRENCE DEACON:
Two million years ago, when the brain began to change size, we were NOT able to produce the kind of speech sounds we use today. We didn’t have the ability to articulate out tongues and larynx and lips in the ways we do today, and that that developed over time. The fact that we can do it so well today suggests it is NOT just icing on the cake, but something that has taken a long time. Something this unusual cannot have happened just sort of after the fact as an accident. Evolution has been working on it for a period of time.

COMMENTAAR:
Volgens Deacon liggen de wortels van taal twee miljoen jaar terug. Archeologen daarentegen houden het op maximaal honderdduizend jaar. Vanwaar dit enorme verschil?

DR. BILL NOBLE:
I think there is a need for caution just because the archeological evidence that we’re talking about here is realy quite sparse, especially the evidence from fossils, the remains of forms that are ancestral to modern human beings, we’re talking about an extremely scattered amount of evidence across many hundreds of thousands of years.

PROF TERRENCE DEACON:
The problem with anthropology -even more than paleontology- the study of fossils is that absence of evidence, absence of proof is not proof of absence. Most of what goes on in our culture goes on in the air between us: in speech and gestures and none of that, the vast, vast, vast majority of human culture has no record at all.

DR. LYNNE SCHEPARTZ:
We might be surprised at how similar Neanderthals were with people living today. I think they had many of the same concerns. They were interested in finding out who lived in their area, who they had friendly relations with, who they might have competed with, they were interested in passing on information about their life way and their environment. And in that, for those reasons I think language was very important to the Neanderthal life as well as to our own.

PROF TERRENCE DEACON:
We are the consequence of language, we are the word made flesh in a sense, very different than other species in a very deep sense and that has significance for everything we do, everything we think and for the way we think of ourselves with respect to other species.

ROLTITEL:
SAMENSTELLING & REGIE Jos Wassink

RESEARCH Monique van de Water

CAMERA Jackó van ‘t Hof
Niels van ‘t Hoff

GELUID Menno Euwe

MONTAGE Jan Overweg
MIXAGE Jack Bol
KLEURCORRECTIE ……………….
LEADER Marco Vermaas
COMMENTAAR Tessel Blok
REDACTIE Hansje van Etten
Hilbert Kamphuisen
Simon Rozendaal
Karin Schagen
Annemiek Smit
Marjan Tjaden
Jacqueline de Vree
Jos Wassink
Monique van de Water
Ger Wieberdink

OERMENSRECONSTRUCTIES Museon,
Rob van Assen

MMV Museon, Den Haag
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden
Groninger Museum,
José Selbach
Israel Museum, Jeruzalem
Ms Debbi Hershman
Prof. Abraham Ronen
Seminar für Ur- und Frühgeschichte
Haifa University:
Dr Sasha Tsatskin
Alla Yaroshevich
Yelena Silantiev
Omar Asfour
Prof Yoel Rak
Tel-Aviv University
Prof. Iain Davidson
University of New England
Prof Wil Roebroeks, Universiteit Leiden
Dr. Gerhard Dalenoord, RU Groningen

PRODUCTIE Madeleine Somer
Karin Spiegel
EINDREDACTIE Rob van Hattum

copyright VPRO, 1999

copyright � Het Inzicht / Jos Wassink, 1999

english version