Out of Africa: Human Generative Creativity and the Origins of Language

What makes us human? We have long known that humanity’s uniqueness–language and our openended creativity–arose from our ancestors in Southern Africa, a generative promiscuity pervading all we do, from combinatorial tool making to combinatorial language; and from there to music and mathematics. But how? In our book Why Only Us, Noam Chomsky and I proposed one answer: a newly evolved computational operation, arising in Southern Africa, forged by a simple rewiring of the brain, and underpinning all human language we observe today–Merge. The idea behind Merge is simple. Everyone has experienced putting two thoughts together to get a new, bigger one — an experience extending to two notes, two brushstrokes, or two footsteps. And typically, once we’ve got hold of a new thought, we can file it away, reusing it. Merge is this principle applied to language. The present project digs deeper into the open questions behind Merge, drawing on resources unique to the Southern African venue: from its rich paleo-biological research culture, to the genomically most ancient and linguistically singular human population, the Khoe-San. Using these, the project will explore exactly how Merge could be implemented in the brain, and when the new ability appeared.