Review of The Origins of Language by Julie Wark, Counterpunch

What’s Revolutionary About the Origins of Language? A Woman Spoke the First Word and It Was "No!"

Julie Wark, Counterpunch

If a book has Revolutionary in its title, it’s perhaps appropriate to go topsy-turvy and begin a review of it with a conclusion (Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis’s The Revolutionary Origins of Language is a wonderful book). As for Origins, the beginnings of an urgent present sense, they will go to the end.

Dedicated to the BaYaka people of the northern Republic of the Congo, this book is wonderful because it’s well written, well constructed, rigorous, erudite yet accessible, gripping, compelling in its argument, stimulating in offering new insights and making you think about what you thought you knew, and there aren’t many books with all these qualities. There’s also something exceptional about its spirit, just a feeling maybe but definitely present. Then there are the anthropological and other skills of Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis whose complementary findings come from so many areas it would be impossible for even the meanest-spirited boffin or savant trying to keep unbreached the walls of some small fief of academic expertise to prove they’re “wrong” (unless it’s wrong to inspire people to think in the age of AI). Knight and Lewis achieve all this while grappling with what’s been called “possibly the hardest problem in science” (1).

Their challenge to entrenched science and prejudice is one good reason for this word “Revolutionary”. Qualifying “Origins”, the word is true in the original etymological sense of “turn or roll back” or returning to the earliest hunter-gatherer societies, and also in its modern sense of “completely new and having a great effect” by taking on “science’s collective failure in this field” (2). More than that, the book is revolutionary in defending a real adorned (in the ritual sense) and unadorned (in the truth sense) humanity, which we are fast losing with the regime of falsity designed by extremely dangerous tech bros of these times of digital eugenics. It’s a beautiful, raw account of what we’re losing. One of the authors told me his daughter cried when she finished the book. It’s easy to see why. Weeping can be revolutionary when we feel strongly about the value of what we’re losing and want to fight for it.

To begin with the revolutionary shakeup of encrusted academic dogma, Knight and Lewis set out to show that “cooperation, reflexivity and high levels of public honesty and trust are necessary conditions for language to flourish and evolve” (284), so their approach is explicitly ethical in identifying trust as preceding language. This would constitute a scientific revolution because, in the almost unchallengeable version of its origins in recent decades, language is presented as having “no necessary connection with “cooperation, trust or even with social communication” (2). This is mainly due to the influence of Noam Chomsky, a linguistic monolith that few people dared to challenge, who defined language as a biological, a computational system, “a particular module within the human mind or brain…[with] no necessary connection with communication” (2), though he begged the question of how such a digital structure evolved. For Chomsky, the only valid scientific field was the natural sciences. In his own dismissive words, trying to find origins of language in “calls of apes and so forth [… ] is a complete waste of time, because language is based on an entirely different principle than any animal communication system” (183).

I think there’s an implied warning in this discussion. If language science comes from a closed domain of computational reasoning and metaphors, which rejects and even mocks the concerns of social sciences, those origins are amoral and dangerous because they can lead (and are leading) to a horrible pro- transhumanist system stripped of social, economic, and political context, where language becomes a vehicle for the warped minds of a minority of “enhanced” elites—with or without biological substrate—uploaded to computers that determine the lives of the unenhanced ones. Language, as Chomsky’s biological mechanism, seems to be surrendering to a system of dominance by mechanisms. Nothing short of revolution will overturn this.

Among egalitarian hunter-gatherer peoples, knowledge is inextricable from social, political, and cultural realms. Far from elite labs of computational linguistics and its bonds with artificial (now touted as real) or machine intelligence, the Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari Desert, for example, have a very different practice of science in their everyday life where survival depends on distinguishing between direct knowledge and speculation. Trackers discuss what they see on the ground and draw lessons from it and each other, cooperatively correcting and modifying ideas to obtain the best possible results. Drawing on long experience with the Ju/’hoansi people, anthropologist Megan Biesele observes that “democracy and science are closely allied in the people’s minds, and closely govern how decisions are made” (15). Far away from the Kalahari, with the BaYaka people, Jerome Lewis found similar democratic behaviour with “close linkages between accountability, language and science” (15).

Arguing against predominant current thinking, this book is a revolution in the science of language. In a nutshell,

“Our narrative is about as different as it could possibly be … combining modern scientific discoveries with the insights of hunter-gatherers we have come to know as colleagues, teachers and friends. Our origins tale roots language in the animal instinct for play – especially social play. We go on to attribute the domestication of the human male to female resistance to harassment. Finally, we see contagious women’s laughter as a key source of the high levels of trust needed for language to evolve” (8).

In other words, unacceptable behaviour like incest, violence, or violation of social norms in general would lead to moral and social collapse (245). The collapse is now upon us and it includes genocide and ecocide with all their consequences.

An essential aspect of the origins of language is the economic base of hunter- gatherer societies, which includes the formation of women’s coalitions and what follows from that. Primatology is significant as among the great apes, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) are the most genetically related to humans with whom they share about 98.7% of their DNA. They’re similar apes in sharing the “same kind of life history, feeding adaptations, anatomical build and evolved psychology” (59). However, in conditions of food scarcity, female chimpanzees had to forage individually and were alone in protecting their young and keeping rivals from their foraging grounds. This allowed males to “monopolize access to these largely isolated and scattered potential mates” (59). Meanwhile, in more abundant conditions, female bonobos could forage in groups where they formed close bonds and could thus wield power over the males (27).

In what Marshall Sahlins called the “original affluent society”, once the economic conditions for coalition were given, language “evolved as a sophisticated politicalachievement resting on a range of previous developments”, including egalitarianism which, as Megan Biesele writes of the Ju/’hoansi people, is underpinned by “determined effort and by fierce and sustained attention to expectations and rules” (18). Also referring to the Kalahari, anthropologist Richard Lee, describes hunter-gatherer egalitarianism as “a positive insistence on the equality of all, combined with a principled refusal to bow to anyone’s superior authority” (38). Egalitarianism has always been a revolutionary idea and now, especially, when in 2025 “the world’s 12 richest men owned more wealth than half of humanity”.

Explanation of how egalitarianism appeared is required, and this focus becomes another revolutionary paradigm shift, for it is now about women. “For too long, accounts of how language emerged in our species have been shaped in ways that reflect male-centered assumptions about what mattered in the deep past” (xiv). Women gave birth to children and they also gave birth to language. Male activities like hunting, warfare, and political alliances have conventionally been treated as the source of cultural and linguistic innovation, while women’s activities— “childbirth, childcare, food-sharing, laughter, singing, dancing, the subtle work of maintaining group cohesion”—have been relegated to the status of social accessories when they actually “organised and motivated collaborative hunting in the first place”. And this came from the fact that, “The First Word was spoken by a woman – and it was ‘No’. She was not alone” (xiv). Like the female bonobos, early women joined forces to resist male violence, help each other in child rearing, in ritually creating safe spaces, and in collecting and sharing food, and all this required certain levels of trust. In other words, ethics preceded language.

An aside: the book’s striking spirit should be mentioned here. The authors practise what they preach, so it’s generous, which makes pleasant reading because their inclusiveness has an unusual effect of seeming to draw in the reader as well.Generosity and its counterpart, gratitude, are abundant in citation of sources from their BaYaka and Hadza friends to local knowledge, always aware of “responsibilities that follow from turning lived experience into published scholarship” (xv). Knight and Lewis are appreciative of academic colleagues, for example, of Sarah Hrdy’s work on cooperative childcare, Kristen Hawkes with her “Grandmother Hypothesis”, Camilla Power and the “Female Cosmetic Coalitions”, and linguist Cedric Boeckx, former specialist in Chomsky’s conception of syntax who came to understand words as “patently false signals” which, as fictions, need a “protective environment” (160). They also point out connections, for example between Boeckx’s linking the attributes of domestication to the complexities of verbal communication, which then ties in with Hrdy’s insight that female sexual choice drove the progressive domestication of the evolving human male (161).

So, how do Knight and Lewis go about demonstrating their origins? They argue that “language was invented when all humans lived by hunting and gathering” (219) and, from there, move on to explore the links between the moon and menstruation among these peoples and how it shaped their societies. They begin with hunter- gatherer egalitarianism as opposed to the competitiveness of great apes (9), and the cooperation that had to be established if words were to become effective. Their “parsimonious” model is that “just one thing – the establishment of trust and cooperation across whole communities – was needed in order for language as we know it to evolve”. The book therefore hunts and gathers in areas not customarily ventured into in linguistic studies because “there can be no such thing as a theory of the origins of language – if ‘language’ is treated as an isolated skill”. Language depends on trust, which depends on sexual and other moral understandings, and moral and sacred concepts depend on ritual, so there were “multiple developments emerging in tandem” (4).

Drawing on Camilla Power’s “Female Cosmetic Coalitions” model to detail how levelling and reversal of the old order was achieved, Knight and Lewis cite “menstrually coded group rituals as the original source of that community-wide trust needed for words to serve as reliable currency” and show how their theory can make testable predictions with the support of “recurrent details recorded in the rituals, magical beliefs and cave art of traditional peoples from across the world” (288). Ritual, as understood by anthropologists, is crucial because without it, “the world would not be divided into categories to which words could refer” (120). Building on Émile Durkheim’s work, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observes that rituals “shape our ways of thinking about our lived worlds” but were also the condition for language to work. Humans “had to be already deeply immersed in habitus, doing such things as sitting down, starting a meal or going to bed in ways everyone agreed to be acceptable” (120). Another significant insight came from Durkheim: “the details of religious belief stem not from human nature – from the way our brains are made – but from the rituals we perform” (121).

Religious belief and rituals highlight the magical aspect of words and also provide another pointer to their origins because, “If humans could not inhabit other worlds – realms constructed out of shared belief – there would be no arena within which words could operate” (126). Belief in other worlds and language are intimately related. Knight and Lewis draw on Durkheim’s insight in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that, “Our logic was born of this logic”, meaning that the origins of modern scientific thought lie in totemic thought. Durkheim gives the example, “Is not the statement that a man is a kangaroo or the sun a bird, equal to identifying the two with each other? But our manner of thought is not different when we say of heat that it is a movement, or of light that it is a vibration of the ether, etc”. For him, this ability to equate things that aren’t at all similar was a “distinctively human breakthrough” (119). Natural science, conventional science, is at a loss when faced with the wealth of evidence that “language operates on a level strangely unconnected with physical or biological reality. There is no measuring device, magnifying glass, telescope or other instrument which can grasp the meaning of a word” (128). Language arose from human metaphorical thought and, “As long as scientists continue to screen out social facts – keeping strictly within the boundaries of physics, chemistry and biology – they will endlessly screen out from language what makes it the remarkable thing it is” (129).

One puzzle for natural science is how humans came to have such large brains, a development documented at between 1,000,000 and 700,000 years ago with archaic humans in Ethiopia and South Africa showing a volume of about 1,250 ml, three times that of the close human relative, the chimpanzee, and complete with a “fully modern vocal tract and auditory system sensitive to speech frequencies” (xii). How did this brain size treble? Answers to this “encephalization” are sought in evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, and gene-culture coevolution models. But they’ve mainly missed the symbolic revolution that ushered in this change, which came through women.

Big brains require much more energy input so the mother, bearing and feeding a child, took the brunt of the costs entailed in supplying this energy, which “would have exceeded what a single mother could afford, caring for such a demanding baby all by herself” (178). As evolutionary anthropologists Kristen Hawkes and Sarah Hrdy argue from different but compatible perspectives, our ancestors “first started to become cognitively and emotionally human” when women started helping each other with childcare. About 1.8 to 1.6 million years ago, when this happened, the first people they could trust were their mothers, which meant they had to live nearby, so matrilocal residence became crucially important in growingsolidarity among women. These coalitions meant that hunters were obliged by a rule called brideservice to turn over their kill to women, and also that women needed to ensure that individual women didn’t infringe shared standards. Bodily decoration signalled a woman’s membership in a rule-based coalition. “As the human symbolic revolution got under way, beads, pendants, pierced shells and items of clothing worn for ritual purposes would have helped foster a sense of communal belonging, of participation in the same group identity – the same ‘we’- intentionality” (290-291).

Drawing on the work of Camilla Power, Knight and Lewis describe how evolving human actual and future mothers managed to get males to help more by means of brideservice, which “rests on the ever-present threat of sexual withdrawal, and the relatively high status this gives women” (289). Brideservice isn’t a form of what’s understood by western notions of marriage. It’s not about a man’s sexual rights but a woman’s control of her own body because “brideservice depends fundamentally on a woman’s right to say ‘no’” (26). Confirming the importance of this is the fact that, “across Africa, the Americas and many other parts of the world, the most important and socially unifying initiation ceremonies were traditionally for girls” (26), essentially to make sure that new generations will observe the community’s rules, especially about sex.

The sex strike (against war) described in Lysistrata (411 BCE) didn’t come out of thin air. It was preceded by documented instances in ancient Greece, and there are many more in other cultures. Among hunter-gatherers, the sex strike is more complex as it isn’t just a response to a specific situation but part of economically, culturally, and politically grounded ritual which, in turn, must be based on moral understanding which was eventually expressed in language. Even now, the economic basis of the sex strike is clear because “any young man in a hunter- gatherer community who wants a sexual relationship must prove himself useful by going hunting, bringing back meat and surrendering it for his mother-in-law’s family to distribute” (178). To sum up, it was when our ancestors stopped behaving like individualist apes, that language and laughter came to found communities inspired by common purpose.

Science tends to suggest that understanding of language is a western skill and it basically entails grammar with a recursive syntactic structure (as in Chomsky’s generative grammar) and mechanisms for expressing various aspects of thought. For the BaYaka, however, “language is essentially mimicry appropriate to the occasion – whether one is conversing with another human, an antelope, a crocodile or the sentient forest as a whole” (46). What really seems to underlie the beginnings of language, then, is an array of mimicry, song, laughter, and play, which were then shaped into social mechanisms like the BaYaka mòádjò, “a formof mimicry or pantomime designed to provoke contagious laughter at behaviour deemed unacceptable or absurd” (39). Rules are established through play and laughter, which create trust and acceptable enforcement of moral norms. In this regard, the BaYaka are close to Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s depiction of play in his famous Homo Ludens (1938) as the basis of all symbolic culture, which would include language. Play “is a fragile bubble of make-believe, needing protection from ordinary life as the sacred needs protection from the profane” (48).

One example of the social aspects of this play is how ridicule and humour function in BaYaka society. The women combat male muscle power with Ngoku, the spirit of female fertility and togetherness that gives them courage when, say, they want the men to leave the central camp space. Once they’ve occupied it, they tease the men with songs reminding them, for example, that “‘The cunt always wins, the cock’s tired already!’” And they “act out hilarious pantomimes to show men, in some detail, how not to do sex” (29). The mòádjò rebukes men who behave unacceptably with contagious, even helpless laughter, which then includes men. It’s not only about sexual desire and desirability as old women, grandmothers and widows, play a special role here and are therefore “in key respects the ultimate guardians of public morality and the egalitarian order”. The point is that, in a mòádjò performance, women “elicit a moralistic commentary from their audience” and have thus “mapped out the moral high ground” (39).

In linguistic terms, the importance of an institution like mòádjò is something that mainstream theorists might accept but they get the causation wrong. Language allows humans to evoke things that aren’t present, like someone who died, a subject of a dream or, in other words a “displaced reference”, but it’s usually understood as endowing this ability. “It’s almost as if such freedom emanates from somewhere inside the words or sound patterns themselves” But mòádjò shows the opposite. Since, in terms of evolution, “displaced reference is already a feature of mòádjò, we need no longer assume that words and grammar had to evolve first” (45)

This social, political, and moral high ground is charted by women in another way too. Jerome Lewis’ friend Emeka explains that “Ekila is the … name of the medicine which the Creator … sent women when women put in the moon” (31). Ekila “norms and prohibitions govern just about everything which concerns proper sharing, respect and appropriate moral behaviour” (186).When observed, it ensures success in “reproduction and hunting, both of which involve shedding blood” (31). When abused, however, ekila brings infertility, difficult births, sick children, and failure in the men’s hunting. After her first menstruation, a girl becomes aware of her potent ekila, through proper handling of her blood and initiation into the secrets of Ngoku and this power governs “not only relations between the sexes butalso their behaviour towards the animals they hunt, the connection between women’s blood and the moon – and countless mysteriously interconnected details of social, sexual and economic life” (30).

With different names, the ekila ethos is common to all hunter-gatherer groups of Central Africa, across southern Congo and Gabon, and in the Kalahari where “women’s most awesome power is said to stem from menstruation, invariably associated with the moon and linked closely with reproductive and hunting success” (35). Menstrual bleeding and blood spilled in the hunt are two separate sacred categories and the general rule is that the two bloods must never be confused. Blood is dangerous and must be properly handled. Misfortunes are connected with blood and sex. This isn’t a matter of a simple (widespread) metaphor equating the menstrual “wound” with that of the bleeding hunted animal. What, in the 1980s, French anthropologist Alain Testart called an “ideology of blood” (252) may be found as an organising principle of a gendered division of labour in all hunter-gatherer cosmologies, where people “understand the danger of confusing these categories of blood – because we would be drowned in incest and violence”. Part of the moral structure pertaining to blood is conservationist because this cosmology requires harmonious relations between people and habitat, and all its beings.

The BaYaka “speak forest” (164). They have “no such category as language in the dry, cold, narrowly cognitive sense assumed by so many theoretical linguists” (166) and they’d never accept that animals can’t talk. “Tune in and you will hear the whole forest alive with agency and communicative intentions, each insect, bird or other intelligent creature listening and responding back in its own distinctive tongue” (167). Language involves song, and “choral singing itself is conceptualized as a human version of the forest’s own chorus of voices being echoed back in turn” (167). Among African hunter-gatherers, polyphonic singing is mainly the responsibility of women who sing non-stop and with particular intensity on dark moonless nights when predators are most dangerous. Moreover, “The rules governing how to sing polyphonically are so deeply internalized that they can be seen in the way that the BaYaka organize their cooperative activities in other cooperative domains, almost as if they were governed by song” (170). Polyphonic singing is another mainstay of the social structure where “people maintain a sensitive awareness of what others are doing and choose something else to contribute, to ensure that the outcome is not only achieved but feels aesthetically pleasing too. This same principle organizes the camp’s daily hunting and gathering activities, each small group choosing to do something different from the others” (170).

This book teems with all sorts of animals, as predators, ancestors, food, and teachers. For example, there’s much to be learned from the eland and how the “ideology of blood” across sub-Saharan Africa includes a metaphorical bond between women’s menstrual blood with blood shed by men in the hunt. The animals belong to the story of the moon and its rhythms for, “All living beings have a pulse” (195). Among the predators our ancestors faced were lions, which were especially linked with the moon because of their exceptional night vision which makes them deadly predators of darkness when they don’t have to expend energy by running fast but can creep up and pounce on sleepy prey. The Kalahari San have special metaphors for lions including “‘night’, ‘moonless night’, ‘night medicine’, ‘cries in the night’ and ‘calf muscles of nightfall’” (197), and the lions themselves are “extremely conscious of the moon” (198). Indeed, the danger of being eaten by a lion in East Africa “waxes and wanes with the moon” (199).

This coexistence of humans, animals, and moon means that key aspects of economic and social life are under strong lunar influence, which takes us back to the evolutionary past of humans in open habitats who, on moonless nights, had to protect themselves by gathering together, and these environmental conditions would have radically transformed relations between the sexes (213). This meant patterns of periodicity that became so stabilised in hunter-gatherer culture that terms for menstruation always refer to the moon, which also happens in English where “the term ‘menstruation’ stems from the Latin mensis or ancient Greek mene – ‘moon’, derived from the Indo-European root *mē, ‘to measure’. What links ‘moon’, ‘month’, ‘metre’, ‘dimension’, ‘menstruation’ and a wealth of related words is the concept of measurement, first and foremost the measurement of time” (214- 215).

Summarising stories, histories, annals, Knight and Lewis make an important observation, noting that “the source of humanity’s myths is unlikely to have been itself a myth. More probably, it was a core feature of ritual, bound up in turn with a central periodicity of life itself” (270). Myths are the oral tradition’s rendering of beliefs, concerns and taboos, especially related with “menstrually coded group rituals as the original source of that community-wide trust needed for words to serve as reliable currency” (288), and this fact can substantiate a social theory of the origins of language that comes to a revolutionary conclusion: “All culture, all morality, all kinship, all religion and all language […] were born in rebellion against primate-style male dominance, constructed as women sang and danced together on the world’s first picket line” (294).

Our species is regressing fast. Artificial intelligence, which appropriates, accumulates, calculates, and doesn’t think, dominates scientific research. In 2025, there were 80,150 AI-related publications in the natural sciences, up 26%from 2024. Computer science shows a preponderance of white and Asian, middle- and upper-class cisgender men. AI development is shaped by a crude geopolitical struggle for dominance between the United States and China. “Science should never be shaped by politics” (xv) but patriarchal science, accepting inequality and war as inescapable consequences of human nature, is part of global political power and it unemotionally presents the awful consequences of its complicity in its insider peer-reviewed papers. When “know thyself” is something artificially produced on a screen, often as selfies and ads for what the screen says you need, when ceaseless flashes of info dope nervous systems into inability to concentrate, when incipient thought is zapped by ready-made distractions, we’re losing the ability to create, think, and use language well. Many young people today are helplessly aware of this.

Thinking isn’t screen-fed. It requires intellectual effort, like that of early egalitarian societies in obtaining food, resisting violence, and creating ethics, from which came language. Numbed, dumbed down, and despising effort, we (western, dominant) humans are reverting to something like chimpanzee society with its rape, incest, infanticide, and violence. Sexual relations are now so crisis-ridden that a US Secret Service report sees incel men as a terrorist threat. A new form of infanticide is rife in Palestine where children are Israeli sniper targets. If ancient chimpanzee society couldn’t have engendered language, today’s version of it is taking language and its dignity from humanity.

Besides its scholarly virtues, this book has many instances of the commonsensical why-didn’t-I-understand-this-before?-effect, for example the idea that ethics had to precede language. Of course it did. It will be interesting to see who and what will try to refute its arguments, fear its sweep, or hate its generosity. Academia, just another cog in the neoliberal capitalist machine, can be a vicious space (think about the recent persecution by eugenicist Nathan Cofnas, his far-right enablers, and the mainstream press that drove Cambridge professor Jason Arday to his death). What if, in a world where screens (literally barriers between users and reality) are altars of falsolatry, attempts were made to dismiss the story told by Knight and Lewis as a myth? Then we need to say yes, good, fine, if it’s a myth coming from theseorigins, we want to embrace it and rebuild on it a language of play, song, laughter, trust, and ethics. In the original roll-back sense of revolution, Knight and Lewis have reminded us of what humans can and should be. This revolution of origins is the one we need, and right now.