Was Language a Parental Invention?

Prehistoric child-care challenges created intense survival pressures that likely favored communicative behaviors enabling others to provide timely help. Cooperative caregiving, rather than solely male-dominated activities like hunting or fighting, became a crucial selective force shaping social cognition. Biological changes, genetic mutations, and natural selection produced traits supporting coordination and information sharing about infant needs. Negotiation of care, shared schedules, and simple calming technologies represent adaptive strategies to manage infant distress. Emphasizing familial care reveals how parenting demands could have driven the evolution of language as a tool for coordinating assistance and improving offspring survival.

If you have spent time with an infant, you might recognize the scene: A child is wailing, inconsolable, and you, the parent, have to go to the bathroom. Or eat. Or attend to a pot that's boiling over. But someone needs to watch the baby. Such urgent situations often call for innovation. In modern times, we might negotiate schedules with our partners, seek out affordable child care, or purchase "baby-tainment" contraptions via our phones.

But a long time ago, our early-human ancestors were caring for children under decidedly more precarious conditions. Receiving some help with the baby could be a matter of life and death. A new book argues that the prehistoric need for assistance may have been so intense that it led to the creation of one of the human species' most defining traits: language.

In The Origin of Language, Madeleine Beekman, a professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, considers human evolution through the often-neglected lens of child-rearing, bringing a relatively new perspective to the field. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, most popular theories of evolution focused on male-dominated, and in many cases aggressive, activities such as hunting, fighting, toolmaking, and semen-spreading to understand our development as a species.

Read at The Atlantic