ABSTRACT
All theorising about the origins and evolution of language rests on a distinction that, by and large, is regarded as so obvious that it virtually goes without saying. It is that by ‘language’, in this context, is meant not any particular language, as spoken presently or in the past by members of some human community, but a capacity that is manifestly common to all human beings, and that is surely one of the hallmarks of our species. One could of course examine the changes over time that have given rise to the immense proliferation of languages spoken around the world, but that is a problem for philologists or historians of language. Does not the very possibility of this history, however, rest on the fact that all of us, including our ancestors up to a certain critical point, share (or shared) the capacity to speak? If so, then explaining how, when and why this capacity arose is a problem not of history but of evolution. The twin distinctions, between particular languages spoken and the capacity for language, and between history and evolution, do indeed seem intuitively reasonable. For my part, however, I am convinced that they are unsustainable, and in this chapter I shall try to show why.
