Humans may not have needed language to hunt, use tools, or manage life in a small group. Other great apes already accomplish much of that through gestures, calls, and an understanding of their companions. The reason spoken language developed may have had more to do with what happened after dark.
A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B argues that fire kept people together for up to four extra hours, creating time for storytelling. Earlier work treated stories as something people began telling after basic language was already in place. The new theory turns that idea around, proposing that storytelling helped human communication move beyond gestures and calls.
“It’s always intriguing to think about how language started — what was the first word? The first story? But we’re usually left in the realm of after-dinner speculations, so it’s especially exciting to be able to generate testable predictions, to be able to ask if, at the end of the day, we are the storytelling ape,” said lead author Catherine Hobaiter in a press release.
Apes Already Communicate More Than We Realize
Researchers have documented more than 140 gestures among eastern chimpanzees and more than 120 among mountain gorillas. The same movement can mean different things depending on the situation and the history between the two animals.
Explore All OptionsApes can also plan ahead, coordinate hunts, use tools, care for injured companions, and navigate alliances. All of this shows how much a species can accomplish without spoken language, while making the gap between ape communication and human culture harder to explain.
“For all their incredible, rich communication and cultures, no other ape is inventing algebra, writing King Lear, or heading out into interstellar space,” Hobaiter said.
Other apes have not been observed turning events into stories. A storyteller has to organize what happened, explain why the characters acted as they did, and keep listeners with them from beginning to end. Over time, the need to tell stories clearly may have helped spoken language become more complex.
Read More: Birdsong and Whale Songs Share a Surprising Similarity With Human Language
Why a Campfire Could Favor Speech
Hobaiter and co-author Nathaniel Jay Dominy also looked closely at the light itself. Their preliminary measurements show that a campfire can illuminate nearby faces while leaving people farther away, or across the flames, difficult to see. Its constantly changing brightness can make gestures harder to follow, which may have given speech an advantage.
Firelight gives off very little blue light — a light that can lower levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep. That may have let people stay up together without disrupting their sleep too much. The brightest flames could still have had some effect, but the light became gentler as the fire burned down, with glowing embers best suited to winding down for the night.
Firelight never stays completely steady, so the researchers measured how quickly it brightened and dimmed. The strongest pattern appeared about 2.7 times per second, near the slower end of speech rhythms. Because brain cells involved in vision can fire in time with flickering light, the authors wonder whether people watching the same fire might begin aligning their attention and behavior as a storyteller speaks.
Putting the Campfire Theory to the Test
The paper ends with six predictions that future studies could test. These include whether stories have a different pace and structure than ordinary conversation, whether speech is easier to understand than gestures in flickering firelight, and whether storytellers and listeners fall more closely into sync.
The first story ever told is lost, but its setting can still be studied. Recreating firelight and watching how people speak, gesture, and listen could show whether the campfire was simply where stories were told or whether it helped change the way they were told.
Read More: Last Common Ancestor of Humans and Chimpanzees May Have Been a Skilled Tree Climber
Article Sources
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- This article references information from a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Firelight and the origins of spoken language
