The gene-centred approach to language’s evolutionary emergence relies on an outdated conception of evolution.  Current research in evolutionary biology highlights the fact that major changes in behaviour and cognition can take place without any changes in the genes.  In many cases it is behavioural change that comes first, subsequently determing genetic change (Dor and Jablonka, Chapter 2).  This understanding opens up the possibility that linguistic capacities may have preceded genetic accommodation for language.  This, together with the indisputable fact that much of our behaviour and cognition is socially constructed implies that social and cultural dynamics need to be positioned centre-stage in any explanation for the emergence of Homo sapiens. p. 2

In language, we formulate our thoughts for others and hence for  ourselves.  It’s a system for publicly expressing our thoughts to help others imaginatively reconstruct them.  This communication technology is used by all human socities despite manifesting remarkable variability in technical design.  It resides and develops at the level of community, and is acquired by individuals as part of their socialization.  Investigating the evolution of our individual cognitive and linguistic abilities as if they operated in social isolation ignores the central component of language.  As we attempt to show throughout this volume, focusing on language in context allows for a new understanding of its origins, since it places social and cultural relationships centre-stage.  It suggests that our pre-linguistic ancestors may have already had significant linguistic potential, but remained blocked from collaboratively constructing actual languages owing to conflict-ridden, mistrustful social conditions.  If this was the problem, language’s evolutionary emergence would have required profound social and political change, more trusting, stable relationships enhancing the chances of cultural innovations being preserved and transmitted, leading eventually to the cumulative construction, grammaticalization, and historical divesification of stable linguistic traditions as we know them today. p. 3

Needless to say, humans are capable of violence, just apes and monkeys are.  But in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance aserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization, a situation which humans would find psychologically intolerable.   Within a human speech community, physical violence or threat between speaker and listener can easily destroy mutual trust.  Where public trust collapses, people cease to be ‘on speaking terms’.  Such conditions are not conducive to linguistic creativity.  Since there are good theoretical reasons for this, several of our contributors infer that, for as long as this type of primate-style social dynamics prevailed, evolving humans would have been unable to realize their lingusitic potential in the delicate joint enterprise of contracting, preserving, innovating, and transmitting actual languages historically across generations. 

On one point we are all agreed: languages began evolving as a conssequence not of one social fact but of multiple interacting ones. . . .  Unprecedented  levels of collective co-operation favoured genetic capacities for interesubjetive sensitivity and understanding.  Pre-linguistic innovations most probably included shared childcare, the control of fire and cooking, projectile weapons, big game hunting, increasingly equal power relations between the sexes, emotional bonding through music, dance and other forms of ritual—and, as a  consquence of increased trust within relatively stable coalitions, steadily increasing chances for cultural innovations to be preserved and transmitted to future generations.  All this drove selection pressures favouring novel capacities for mimetic, gestural, and vocal communication, culminating finally in levels of trust sufficient for linguistic innovations to be preserved and for self-organized grammatical structures to emerge.  p. 4

 . . . Power focuses on the trend towards counter-dominance and egalitarianism highlighted by the co-operative eye hypothesis and deep social mind.  Counter-dominance in Power’s view culminates in reverse dominance established through a uniquely human social revolution—inaugurating a hunter-gather tradition of ritual action in which primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again. p. 5

As Chris Sinha argues in chapter  3, none of this implies that the social and biological explanations ‘are fated to eternal opposition’.  On the contrary, the new paradigm highlights the ‘dual ontology’ of language—the fact that it exists both in society and in the mind.  Language consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire human semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and non-material, that is symbolic in nature.  Sinha identifies the origins of language in the transition from signals of the kind used by other animals to influence one another’s behaviour—what might be termed body language—to something entirely new.  Humans began to interact ‘intersubjectively’, each viewing their own mental states and intentions as if through the other’s eyes.  Against this background,our ancestors accomplished the momentous transition to mutually agreed symbols, used by humans to influence not the world, but how others understand the world. p. 5

The range and boundaries of plasticity are not fixed, however, and in some cases plasticity itself can be plastic.  This is especially clear in the case of complex behaviors.  For example, the cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic. 23

 . . . it is important to realize that language itself, once it was there, immediately enhanced the group’s capacity for further collective exploration, because it provided a revolutionary new tool for the construction of the common representational space.  As Tylen et. al. (2010: 3) indicates in a comprehensive review article, experimental evidence clearly shows that language facilitates social interaction in four ways, all of which are crucial for collaborative exploration: “Language dramatically extends the possibility-space for interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action plans, and mediates the cultural shaping  of interactive minds. . . .  Language, then, may have been entanged from the very beginning in a co-evolutionary spiral with the human capacity for collaborative creativity—first as a product, within the common representational space, then (immediately) as a tool for the further construction of the common space. 26

 . . . some biologists are increasingly acknowledging the role of culture in shaping the evolutionary process at the genetic level, by the construction of new selective environments. Current developments  in theoretical biology, among which niche construction theory is particularly salient, significantly depart from the neo-Darrwinian synthesis that dominated 20th-century biology, by incorporating an ecological dimension that, I shall argue, proves to be particularly important for understanding human linguistic and cognitive evolution.  32-3

Language . . . is a quasi-artefactual biocultural niche, and the capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication of a phenogenotypic biocultural complex. 37

 . . . what makes humans unique is not an innate language acquisition device plus a variety of other species-specific innate cognitive modules, but a generalized semiotic or symbolic capacity, epigenetically developed from a suite of cognitive capacities largely shared with other species, but attaining higher levels of organization in humans.  This capacity is not inscribed in the human genome, but distributed across the practices and systems co-constituing (with the epigenetically developed human organism) the human phenogenotype.  39

It is incresingly recognized, in theories of distributed cognition, that human cognitive processes extend ‘beyond the skin’, involving intersubjectively shared mental states and cultural-cognitive technologies.  This presents a conceptual problem not only for psychology, with its traditional individualist assumptions, but also for biology, which assumes by default that the organism as a behavioral and morphological individual is identical to the organism as bearer of genetic material. 44-5

However, a further step, specific to human evolution and development, can and should be taken.  The human organism, by virtue of the semiotic status of the body and the normative shaping of its activities in a cultural field, has a dual ontology, both culturally constituted as a constituent of the semiosphere and, at a purely biological level, a genetic individual.  The body is part of the system which extends beyond the body, as well as being the originating sine qua non of that system.  While non-human organisms are symplex, the human organism is duplex, and its phenogenotypic coupling with the constructed niches involves a developmenta process of auto-construction. Language has a dual ontology, as part of biological human species-being—what it means to be human—and as a foundational social institution in the Durkheimian sense.  45

The nine-month ontogenetic ‘revolution’ enabling the human infant to participiate in intersubjectivity and shared intention (Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003) must be based in a phylogenetic revolution of certain species  of of Homo where Machiavellian strategies of counter-dominance (Redal and Whiten 1994, 1996) and reverse dominance (Boehm 1999) became more successful than primate dominance.  Whiten and Erdal (2012) emphasize the socio-cognitive complex of cooperation, egalitarianism, and mindreading alongside language and cultural transmission in the evolution of humans as successful hunter-gatherers.  On the basis of similar life history variables (Robson and Wood 2008)—length of lifespan, inter-birth intervals, onset of childhood, and late maturation—candidate species for sharing in this overthrow of primate dominance leading to cooperative cultural cognition are H. neanaderthaensis and possibly H. heidelbergensis, ancestors of ourselves and the Neanderthals from half a million years ago (Opie and Power 2008; Stringer 2012). 51

Current discourse on human experiencing tends to ignore the privacy of experience for a very good theoretical reason: much of the discourse has emerged as a counter-reaction to the solipsistic view of human experiences based on Cartesian philosophy, and has thus sytematically highlighted the intersubjective nature of human experiencing—the primacy of the interpersonal over the intrapersonal.  p. 108

In order to understand language, then, I suggest that we have to abandon both the Kantian dictum, the foundational presupposition of the cognitive sciences, that all human experiences comply with a universal interpretive scheme, and the neo-Kantian conviction, the foundational presupposition of most of the social sciences, that the members of every culture and sub-culture experience the world in the same ways.  We have to begin with the acknowledgement that each human individual lives in a private, experienctial world which is different from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them.  p. 109  Roper, Lacan

All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs, their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of their speakers. 124

Emily Wyman, "Language and Collective Fiction"

Camilla Power, "The evolution of ritual as a process of sexual selection"

Back in 1960, social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins contrasted typical primate dominance with human relations mediated by symbolic kinship: ‘Dominance is at its nadir among primitive hunters and gatherers,’ he wrote, ‘Culture is the oldest “equaliser”. Among animals capable of symbolic communication, the weak can always collectively connive to overthrow the strong’ (1960: 83).

Victor Turner, one of the greatest experts on ritual, adopted Iowan Lewis’s phrase ‘the powers of the weak’ in his thesis on sacredness (1969: 85). Aspects of the sacred are liminality, the state of being betwixt and between, marked by juxtaposition of phenomena counter to perceptible reality (Turner 1967: 105), and communitas, the assertion of equality through stripping away all difference of rank. A true Durkheim- ian, Turner rooted symbolism in ritual action, and gave ritual primacy as generator of linguistic concepts. If the weak can temporarily take power from the strong, it is because symbols summon the force of their ritual coalition in action—collective intentionality in John Searle’s (1995) terms. Turner’s idea of ritual symbols as a force—direct action in a field of social drama—suggests the causality of Sahlins’ formulation should be reversed: because among Machiavellian humans the weak can connive to overthrow the strong, we are animals capable of symbolic communication.

Only given social forces of counter-dominance—where individuals with allies can resist being dominated—and reverse-dominance—where the collective dominates any would-be dominant individual—is language likely to emerge. The strong have no need of it; they have more direct, physical means of persuasion. Any tendency towards helping others to read one’s mind will be suppressed to the extent physical dominance holds sway. No one exposes what they are thinking to bullies. Although vulnerable to being hijacked by the politically powerful, sacred traditions the world over invoke manifestations of reverse-dominance as the collective moral sanction, the alliance of the weak against unrestrained physical dominance. Without a model for counter-dominance ameliorating basic economic, social and sexual inequalities, no speech community can be viable. In David Erdal and Andrew Whiten’s (1994) view, such counter-dominance arises as part of the evolutionary process of selection for Machiavellian intelligence and encephalization. While they address economic and political competition, no Darwinian model can be adequate without incorporating factors of sexual competition. Female proto-symbolic strategies (Power and Aiello 1997) of coalitionary action introduce that component and must be seen as integral to Machiavellian intelligence models of gossip (Dunbar 1996b; Power 1998) and counter- dominance (Erdal and Whiten 1994). Within symbolic culture, this becomes fully expressed as reverse dominance (Boehm 1999) implementing collective intentionality.

If we accept the hypothesis that we can have no language without the evolution of ritual performance (Durkheim 1964 [1912]; Knight 1998; Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995; Power 1998; Rappaport 1999; Watts 2009), this is good news for students of the evolution of language. A coevolution model means material archaeo- logical evidence and the possibility of testing predictions. Models for the evolution of ritual also offer more prospect of direct analogy with non-human animal behaviour, as Turner acknowledged when he engaged in a conference organized by Julian Huxley on ‘Ritualization of behaviour in animals and man’ in 1965. Such continuity implies we can ask concretely what circumstances in Homo evolution would lead animal ritualized behaviour to be spread into signalling coalitions (rather than signaller–receiver dyads), and to engage with ‘the other world’—imaginary space and time beyond the here and now.  pp. 196-7