Book Reviews

ORIGINS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION. By Michael Tomasello.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2008. 393 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-20177-3. $36.00 (cloth).

Michael Tomasello’s book is a refreshing departurefrom other current expositions that take as a givenNoam Chomsky’s claim that an innate, genetically trans-mitted organ of the human brain, the ‘‘Universal Gram-mar,’’ specifies in detail the syntax of all languages. Forexample, Steven Pinker, following Chomsky’s lead,claims that children ‘‘acquire’’ a language by simply acti-vating the syntactic features and the meanings of wordsof the language they are exposed to. In these Chomskianmodels, humans differ from other species in that ourbrains are preloaded with syntax and basic wordmeanings.

Tomasello instead proposes that collaborative and co-operative behavior is the central feature that distin-guishes humans from other species, including the greatapes. Tomasello’s expert knowledge is evident in his dis-cussion of the development of ‘‘theory of mind,’’ the abil-ity to place oneself in the place of another and thus inferintention. Drawing on his own extensive research oncognitive and communicative behavior in nonhuman pri-mates and the development of these capabilities in earlychildhood, Tomasello argues that a person’s acquisitionof one or more particular languages results from generalcognitive processes that, though they may be species-spe-cific human attributes, are the result of selection toenhance cooperative behavior.

The book notes that collaborative-cooperative behaviormanifests itself in many ways: in cultural norms, ‘‘peoplein almost all cultural groups have internalized norms forsharing and fairness’’ (p. 187); and in daily life, in ‘‘thefact that individuals often want to offer help to otherseven without being requested to’’ (p. 85). Tomasello’s ‘‘ev-olutionary hypothesis that human cooperative communi-cation evolved as part of a larger adaptation for collabo-rative activities and cultural life in general’’ is expliciton page 110. Evolution, presumably selection for theneural substrate that yielded this human trait, alsoresulted in the evolution of human linguistic ability,which facilitates cooperative communication. The start-ing point for human communication, according toTomasello, was pointing, which led to iconic gesturalcommunication, which then led to complex gestural com-munication that made use of syntax to convey distinc-tions in meaning.

Although Tomasello rejects innate knowledge of gram-mar, another of Chomsky’s underlying tenets—a sup-posed absolute gap between apes and humans—markshis own position. Chomsky claims that human linguisticability is disjoint from the communications of all othercontemporary species. That position, which virtually alllinguists hold, is reified by Tomasello, who notes thatprimate vocalizations are bound to particular emotionalstates or acts. Tomasello, in fact, widens the ape–humangap. He notes that apes never point in their natural

habitats. In contrast, he presents evidence for humanspointing to convey referential information in everydaylife, when context is taken into account. According toTomasello, apes using gestural systems, such as thechimpanzees raised by the Gardners in a ‘‘cooperative’’human environment in which a simplified form of Amer-ican Sign Language (ASL) was used, never comm-unicated anything other than egocentric requests. Incontrast, children at an early age will volunteer infor-mation, a cooperative act. However, the records of theGardner studies show that the chimpanzees clearly com-municated more than simple requests. Washoe wasfilmed signing ‘‘baby in my cup,’’ referring to an imagestenciled into the bottom of her drinking cup. Otherchimpanzee communications were insults or concernedpast events.

Tomasello also argues against evidence that woulddemonstrate that chimpanzees cooperate when theyhunt and afterwards share their prey. However, JaneGoodall’s and Chris Boehm’s follow-films of the Gombechimpanzees document them cooperating in many activ-ities and sharing food. Nevertheless, Tomasello concludesthat in all situations, chimpanzees ‘‘simply try to dowhat is best for themselves’’ (p. 94). Debi Fouts alsoshowed, contrary to Tomasello’s claim, the transmissionof ASL by older chimpanzees to the young chimpanzeeLoulis in a cooperative, communicative environment.Tomasello himself notes that chimpanzees raised in ahuman environment will point, which is consistent witha cooperative environment playing a major role in theacquisition and transmission of language.

Tomasello, in my view, weakens his argument for co-operative social relations being a critical factor in theevolution of human communication by arguing for anabsolute gulf between primate and human ‘‘informative’’communication and cooperation. Tomasello doesn’t seemto take into account that, as Darwin pointed out, naturalselection works on small differences and would need astart point. Without some vestige of cooperative behav-ior, informative communication, pointing, etc., Tomasellowould have to invoke Darwin’s concept of an organ pre-viously used for one function taking on a new role (‘‘pre-adaptation’’ to Mayr, ‘‘exaptation’’ to Gould), but Toma-sello’s evolutionary sequence doesn’t invoke that evolu-tionary mechanism.

The elephant in the room is speech, the default me-dium for human language, which also conveys emotionand affect. So the question is: How can we account forthe evolution of speech? Tomasello avoids this issue. Hepresents the usual arguments for speech’s selectiveadvantages: communicating in the dark, using one’shands, and so on. However, he does not present any newevidence that would illuminate the nature and evolutionof the neural hardware that yields human speech. Oneanswer suggested by Gordon Hewes almost 40 years ago,is that Broca’s area, a region of the prefrontal cortex,may have initially regulated gestures and then somehowbecame adapted for speech. Tomasello repeats this argu-ment, noting studies of mirror neurons that respond tomotor acts and the sounds that they produce. However,

VVC 2010 WILEY-LISS, INC.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 142:164–166 (2010)

recent studies published by Merlin Donald, TerranceDeacon, and my own and other research groups, showthat Broca’s area is not the brain’s language organ. Theneural bases of human language are far more complexand are implicated in other aspects of human behaviorincluding the cognitive capacities that yield cooperativebehavior. The findings of these studies, had they beennoted, would lend support to Tomasello’s thesis that lan-guage cannot be studied without taking account of otherdefining aspects of human behavior and culture.

PHILIP LIEBERMAN

Cognitive and Linguistic SciencesBrown UniversityProvidence, Rhode Island

DOI 10.1002/ajpa.21075Published online 22 February 2010 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com).

THE LINK: UNCOVERING OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS. By ColinTudge with Josh Young. New York: Little, Brown andCompany. 2009. 262 pp. ISBN 978-0-316-07008-9.$25.99 (cloth).

Google Search tells me there are 542,000 results for‘‘Ida fossil’’ as I write. ‘‘Darwinius’’ generates 129,000;‘‘Lucy fossil,’’ 576,000. I am not sure what this means.That the publicity worked? That the wired world has, ina few short weeks, made a monster hit of a fossil thatwould normally have been destined for obscurity outsidethe scientific community but now rivals the iconic speci-men that put paleoanthropology on the map 35 yearsago?

Anyone who spent the third week of May 2009 insidea soundproof vault might have missed the media circusthat accompanied the announcement of a new Eoceneprimate from the Messel site near Frankfurt, Germany,long treasured for its astonishingly complete specimens.‘‘Any pop band is doing the same thing,’’ said JørnHurum to the New York Times (Tim Arango, ‘‘Seeking aMissing Link, And a Mass Audience,’’ May 18, 2009),explaining the media hype, which culminated in a cere-monious unveiling at the American Museum of NaturalHistory, and, incidentally, the fossil’s formal scientificdescription. The Link is the literary flank of this shock-and-awe blitzkrieg. It tells the story yet again—andprobably more of the backstory than we should know—tothat point. But if time travel were possible, no doubtThe Link would also recount the episode’s aftermath inan effort to control the spin, for never has our field beentreated to such theatrics.

The Players: Jørn Hurum, exuberant forty-somethingvertebrate paleontologist little known, perhaps, in theWestern Hemisphere but much beloved, one expects, bythe Norwegian kids who watch his weekly televisionshow; Jens Franzen, recently retired paleomammalogist,Grube Messel’s leading authority and patron protector;Philip D. Gingerich, brilliant paleomammalogist withunparalleled knowledge of the Eocene; B. Holly Smith, aleading expert on growth and development of primateteeth; Wighart von Koenigswald, paleomammalogistversed in dental functional morphology; Anthony Geffen,television producer with dozens of documentaries to hiscredit, including ‘‘The Search for Atlantis,’’ ‘‘Jack theRipper: Case Unsolved,’’ and ‘‘Predator-X,’’ the last abouta pliosaur recently excavated by none other than JørnHurum; and authors Colin Tudge and Josh Young, aboutwhom more below.

Act 1. Hurum learns a spectacular fossil skeleton isup for ransom after being held hostage from science for25 years by a secretive German digger who once plun-

dered Messel. Realizing it was ‘‘like finding the lost ark’’(p. 14), ‘‘one of the holy grails of science—the missinglink’’ (p. 13) (Watch out, Indy: that’s two!), he acquires itfor less than a million dollars to benefit science and theNatural History Museum of the University of Oslo,where it shall become their ‘‘Mona Lisa’’ (p. 19). ToFranzen, it is ‘‘the eighth wonder of the world’’ (p. 21).Knowing little about the specimen other than it isprimate, female (no baculum), and juvenile—and in-spired by memories of Pippi Longstocking’s pet monkey—Hurum searches for a handle, rejects common Swedishnames, such as Nelson, and, after consulting his wife,decides the crush of world publicity would do their childno harm and dubs the fossil Ida, after their equally beau-tiful daughter of approximately the same dental age. Onecould not make this up.

Act 2. Hurum assembles the above ‘‘Dream Team’’ andpledges them to do the science in utmost secrecy, even asGeffen’s Atlantic Productions publicity machine plans amedia roll-out synched to the History Channel’sMemorial Day program schedule and perfectly coordi-nated with a publication in PLoS One (Franzen JL,et al. 2009. PLoS One 4(5): e5723. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723).

Act 3. D(for Darwinius)-Day arrives, marking thebeginning of the end of message control and setting off amushroom cloud in the untamable blogosphere. But asquickly as the wired world giveth, it taketh away, andone realizes that only two characters separate ‘‘famous’’from ‘‘infamous.’’ Considered opinion (my own humblyincluded) is that the PLoS article provides nothing tosupport the claim that Ida is a 47-million-year-oldhuman ancestor, which is how the story was scripted,and the rise and fall of Darwinius masillae, the fossilthat would ‘‘be the image of our early evolution for gen-erations to come’’ (p. 229), are almost simultaneous. Thepaper proposes that Darwinius, lemurish in every waybut lacking the toothcomb and grooming claw, is an ada-piform with a twist: it’s also a haplorhine. (At this point,I consult Dictionary.com for a technical definition of‘‘schizophrenia.’’) Interviewed for the History Channel’sdocumentary, ‘‘The Link,’’ Gingerich playfully calls Ida a‘‘lemur monkey.’’ Authors and readers of respected sci-ence blogs, such as Pharyngula, rail against the PLoSreview process and the paper’s lack of phylogenetic rigor.A heavy bevy of experts weigh in on Ida’s bottom line: itis a lovely fossil strepsirrhine. Hurum’s ark was not lostbut on its way to Madagascar. Jens Franzen promisedthat the paper would be like ‘‘an asteroid hitting theearth’’ (p. 35); true, the fireball was bright, but itsimpact was less bolide than cosmic dust.

165BOOK REVIEWS

American Journal of Physical Anthropology

Act 4. The Link is released on Amazon, giving rise tomore cognitive dissonance and subliminable (a perfectword, courtesy of George W. Bush) imagery. The bookjacket transmogrifies Michelangelo’s The Creation ofMan, depicting a rigor-mortified, hand-of-God-like imageof Ida’s manus. It headlines Colin Tudge, a respected,accomplished science writer. But the title page introdu-ces a co-writer, Josh Young, who, Tudge admits in hisacknowledgments, wrote the two introductory chaptersand the epilogue, 36 pages in all. He, Tudge, did therest. Five of these six chapters are good. They discussthe Eocene world, how Grube Messel was formed, its fos-sils and what they tell us, primates, and primate evolu-tion. Here Ida, pre-publication thus taxonomically name-less and scientifically amorphous, tends to appear in lit-tle more than cameos tying Tudge’s text to the cause.His sixth chapter, ‘‘Who and What is Ida?’’, is focusedbut weak, as Tudge must square science with the DreamTeam’s hyperbole. The work by coauthor Young, in con-trast, is sensationalistic, overwritten hype that will beread with joy by creationists for its portrayal of thiswhole endeavor as publicity obsessed. Every jacked-up,gushing pronouncement by the Dream Team’s leader(s)finds its way into his writing. But to be fair, I must notethat the comments elicited from Gingerich and Smithare always reserved, professional, and in perspective.

Act 5. Not yet written. The junior-varsity team awaitsits chance. Let’s hope Ida is not a Caenopithecus, asFranzen thought when he first described the fossil’spancaked skull and dentition (Franzen J.L. 1994. In:Fleagle, JG, Kay, RF, editors. Anthropoid Origins. New

York: Plenum. pp. 99–122.). Then, it was only known asa partially complete slab of a specimen with a few inten-tional alterations. Yes, the fossil had a prior paleontolog-ical life before Ida became Ida!

My advice is to buy this book when it is remainderedfor three bucks, because you will be tempted to rip outthe Young chapters in lieu of tearing out your own hair.The color pictures of Darwinius and other extraordinaryMessel fossils are certainly worth that much, and all butone of the Tudge chapters are smart. The computerizedskull reconstruction is quite nice, too, even if it doesdepict an adult cleverly fashioned with a fused mandibu-lar symphysis for anthropoidal appeal. But I did notmuch care for the reaching bipedal stance of the full-skeleton rendering. This baby belongs in lemur land. Itwill not be climbing up that old Scale of Nature or acrossthe strepsirrhine–haplorhine divide, no matter how hardit is pushed, pulled, or kicked . . . or by whom.

ALFRED L. ROSENBERGER

Department of Anthropologyand Archaeology

Brooklyn College-CityUniversity of New YorkBrooklyn, New York

DOI 10.1002/ajpa.21214Published online 30 October 2009 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com).

166 BOOK REVIEWS

American Journal of Physical Anthropology