There's a very famous experiment where a coupe of scientists brought chimpanzee babies up as humans from birth, speaking to them and treating them like their own.
The theory was that the chimps would end up able to; as they have extremely similar facial musculature as us, other primates certainly have the mechanics to speak.
But after several years of trying, all the animals could manage was a few rudimentary grunts and sounds that communicated certain simple desires like food or water.
The conclusion was that the human brain comes hard-wired for learning language, a hypothesis promoted by Chomsky and other leading linguists. Without consciously teaching a child how to speak (as we have to do for mathematics or writing), we do so simply by being around them in our day to day lives as they grow up.
That got me thinking about the difference between humans and animals, and I decided that maybe language is the only real difference, a talent our proportionately large brain must comprise of in at least a large part.
Watching chips communicate makes you realise that they're limited to a very basic set of vocalisations, gestures, postures and expressions. We see them shake branches and bark to ward off enemies or potential successors to their alpha male status, bare their teeth when angry, hoot when alarmed etc, but that's it.
It helps explain things if you consider that each animal (including us) has an inner life – a set of fears, desires, wants, needs and ideas. At their most basic, they're the same throughout the animal kingdom.
Every animal is essentially an island, cut off from every other life form because of the inefficiency with which they can communicate their inner life to each other, predators, prey or their environment.
The inner life of a human organism is a chicken and egg question; our inner life might not be terribly more complicated than that of a chimp as we feel fear for our offspring, the desire to mate or provide for our social group (family) or we clamour for access to land or resources.
But our powers to express that inner life are incredibly broad. We can describe every facet of our inner lives with extreme efficiency (just by making sounds with our mouths) to anyone else in our species.
What that's promoted after a hundred million years of evolution is what must be the most developed sense of empathy in the animal kingdom.
The chimpanzee has the mental and physical capabilities to construct a great and complicated society – maybe more so than us with our comparatively weaker upper bodies. But what restricts them is the ability not just to have an idea that could be construed as technology or invention (as many linguists believes, we see in words), but the ability to communicate that to his or her fellows.
Every chimpanzee would have to start from scratch and construct a great society completely on his or her own, the ideas and the method of execution cut off from his contemporaries simply because the extent of his powers to communicate with them are limited to shaking branches, thumping rocks together and hooting.
The human organism, by comparison, can be described as partly the hard-wired ability for language and partly the collected wisdom of his or her entire species.
When the first mud hut was constructed by inventive plains dwellers, the accumulated knowledge they realised in making it a success has led directly to the world of today with glass and steel skyscrapers reaching into the sky.
Long-term memory might be what we call the power to retain and recall all the information we can communicate to each other, but if you think of all the times you just haven't been able to remember some small detail about something and instead have had to look it up, that's the power of speech, not our extremely fallible memories. The power of speech can be thought of as collective memory.
Most things anyone in human history has learned or decided can be or have been bought to us because of the power of language (and reading, by simple extension).
Now it may be that the other animals are supremely more intelligent than us and have failsafe linguistic systems we could never recognise, let alone understand. It might be simply that they're content to involve themselves in the simple pursuits of food and reproduction rather than art, commerce or space travel. Maybe all we have that sets us apart from them is the power of ambition. If that's true speech among humans might be the most rudimentary form of communication among life on Earth.
But if casual anthropological observation bears out, the human race as a species is closer together than any other simply because individual experience can be disseminated through the whole collective in efficient terms that provoke the empathy language has prepared our brains to feel
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