Women and Language: How 'No' Became the First Word
The origin of language is one of science's most stubborn mysteries. Anthropologists Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, in their book "The Revolutionary Origins of Language," challenge Noam Chomsky and propose a social theory. They argue that language did not emerge during hunting or warfare, but in the everyday work of women who kept the group from violence.
Red ochre is a key argument for their theory. In the Blombos Cave in southern Africa, a workshop was found where, around 100,000 years ago, paint was made from ochre. There, the oldest known drawing, made with ochre about 73,000 years ago, was also discovered. Linguists believe that women painted their bodies with ochre during rituals.
Traces of the first writing remain: clay tablets from Mesopotamia date back to the 4th millennium BC. However, spoken language, which likely first emerged in Africa, left no material evidence. Thus, its origins have been debated without facts. In 1866, the Paris Linguistic Society even banned discussion of this topic.
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Women of the Himba tribe in Namibia today cover their skin and hair every morning with a paste made from ground red ochre.
Anthropologists Knight and Lewis rely on indirect evidence: myths, rituals, hunting taboos, and archaeological finds. Lewis studied the Biyaka hunter-gatherers in Central Africa for thirty years. According to his observations, hunting does not aid in the development of speech: Biyaka men remain silent in the forest and communicate through gestures.
Women played a crucial role, restraining male aggression and fostering group cohesion. The first word was spoken by a woman, and it was the word "no." The authors also reference Kristen Hawkes' "grandmother hypothesis," which suggests that young mothers lived with their mothers, who were skilled at foraging for tubers during droughts.
However, as reviewer Andrew Robinson notes in Nature, this does not bring us closer to understanding how speech originated. The authors, like Chomsky, believe that primate communication explains nothing. They see the roots of language in children's instinct to play. But what that "first word" was for children remains a mystery.
