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Origins of Human Communication ‐ by Michael Tomasello

Article  in  Mind & Language · March 2010

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01388.x

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Review
Origins of Human Communication
by Michael Tomasello.
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2008. Pp. 400.
STEVEN GROSS

This bold and wide-ranging book, based on Tomasello’s 2006 Jean Nicod Lectures,
argues inter alia for the following hypotheses:
1. the evolution of human communication required our species-unique capac-
ity for shared intentionality;
2. human communication had its evolutionary origins in gesture, not vocaliza-
tion; and
3. given the cooperative communicative use of natural gestures backed by
shared intentionality, conventional communication arose in large part as an
emergent feature of human mechanisms of cultural transmission.
The claims are grounded in a wealth of fascinating data, particularly on primate and
young child communication and social cognition, much produced by Tomasello’s
own lab. But there is certainly no dearth of stimulating speculation. Tomasello’s
story is rich and complex. In what follows, I focus on aspects of the three hypotheses
listed above, offering some commentary as I go.

1. Communication and Shared Intentionality

Chimps, our nearest extant relatives, communicate through vocalization and gesture.
But they do not communicate in order to be helpful.

. . . when a whimpering chimpanzee child is searching for her mother, it is

almost certain that all of the other chimpanzees in the immediate area know
this. But if some nearby female knows where the mother is, she will not tell
the searching child, even though she is perfectly capable of extending her arm
in a kind of pointing gesture (p. 5).

Chimps simply lack the relevant prosocial motives.

Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400

N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Mind & Language, Vol. 25, No. 2 April 2010, pp. 237–246.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
238 S. Gross
Indeed, according to Tomasello, a failure to factor chimp uncooperativeness into
experimental paradigms led him and others mistakenly to conclude a decade ago
that chimps lack even rudimentary mind-reading capacities. It turns out that chimps
placed in naturally competitive situations do indeed seem to understand (in some sense)
that others have goals and perceptions on which their actions depend. For example,
in competition for food, chimps flexibly adjust their own behaviour according to
what a presumed competitor can see and therefore might do.
But as impressive as chimps are, their cognitive skills do not extend, so far as
anyone has been able to show, to what is required for ‘shared intentionality’: they
do not engage in collaborative activity or otherwise indicate that they represent
themselves and others as thinking and doing things together. (Tomasello advances a
cognitively lean interpretation of chimp hunting, a proposed counter-example.)
Chimp communication differs markedly in these respects from even simple
human communication. Even very young children can point in order to commu-
nicate helpfully—to indicate, for instance, where Daddy should look for his glasses.
And human communication, again even from an early age, exploits our capacities
for establishing joint attention, joint goals, and conceptual common ground. If a
14-month-old and an adult share an exciting experience of an object that is then
placed with two other objects, the child will interpret the adult’s ‘ambiguous’ point
towards the three objects as indicating the object they experienced together; but
she will not so understand the same gesture made by an adult with whom she did
not share this experience (pp. 128–9).
Assuming chimps have not lost relevant features our common ancestors possessed
(a reasonable assumption insofar as the remarks above generalize to other extant
great apes), these differences mark beginning and end points that any account of the
evolution of human communication must accommodate. Thus, one of Tomasello’s
main hypotheses is that the evolution of distinctively human communication
required the evolution of prosocial motives and cognitive skills sufficient for shared
intentionality. Human communication is a particularly important example of how
primate intelligence, conceived in competition (cf. Byrne and Whiten, 1988), was
revamped by cooperation. Human ontogeny provides further suggestive evidence
for Tomasello’s hypothesis: although infants’ prosocial motives and physical ability
to gesture emerge earlier, their cognitive skills for shared intentionality and their
earliest cooperative communication emerge simultaneously around 12 months.
More speculatively, Tomasello claims not just that the motives and skills were
evolutionarily necessary for the emergence of cooperative communication, but also
that cooperative communication was not necessary for the emergence of these
motives and skills, at least in their initial form: indeed, the motives and skills were
evolutionarily prior (p. 8). Once collaborative activity involving these motives
and skills was in place (Tomasello says little here about their origins, though see
pp. 193–4), cooperative communication arose to coordinate collaborative activity
more efficiently. This occurred, first, in the context of mutualistic collaborative
activity, in which participants directly help themselves by helping others. Helpful
communication then generalized beyond mutualistic contexts via mechanisms of
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Origins of Human Communication: Tomasello 239
indirect reciprocity, whereby one helps oneself by enhancing one’s reputation
for cooperativeness. Still later, motivations to share emotions and attitudes more
generally arose via group-level selection as a means to promote social bonding and
expand common ground.
Tomasello’s main claim is exceedingly plausible (indeed perhaps tautological
under some construals: is communication only cooperative and thus in the relevant
sense distinctively human if, unlike chimp hunting, it involves the relevant prosocial
motives and cognitive skills?).1 The obvious strategy in reply would be to argue
that the evolution of shared intentionality and collaborative activity require that
something like distinctively human communication be in place first or at least
coevally.
For example, some argue that, not just the capacity for communication, but
more specifically the capacity for language is necessary for the capacity to combine
representations broadly across modules (Carruthers, 2002; Spelke, 2003). If this
is so, and if collaborative activity and/or shared intentionality require a broad
capacity for cross-modular representational combination, this would challenge
Tomasello’s thesis. It is possible, however, that collaborative activity and shared
intentionality emerged initially in restricted contexts that required integration only
of representations across limited domains—e.g. those involved in the procurement
of food. (Note that chimps, on Tomasello’s view, presumably already integrate
representations relevant to hunting and feeding with representations generated by
their capacity for individual intentionality.) Language, if something like Carruthers’
or Spelke’s view is right, would then serve merely to broaden our already existing
capacities for collaborative activity and shared intentionality.
Again, some are sceptical that prelinguistic kids have the capacity for complex
meta-representation of the sort apparently implicated in accounts of common
ground (e.g. Griffin and Dennett, 2008). Presumably, their scepticism would
extend to our prelinguistic ancestors. Tomasello’s ascriptions of common ground are
perhaps less threatened than others’ because he invokes primitive ‘we-intentionality,’
following Searle (1995). On such a view, it might suffice for joint attention, joint
intention, and common ground that the prelinguistic believe that we see X together,
intend together to A, know together that P, etc. Ascriptions of such states needn’t
imply that subjects in addition represent, or have the capacity to represent, that
I know that you know that I know ad infinitum. (Tomasello sometimes states
that common ground does require such states, at least implicitly or dispositionally
(e.g. pp. 94–5); but elsewhere (pp. 335–7), in what seems his considered view, he
suggests that this is a later accomplishment.) Indeed, if we-intentionality involves
not a distinct representation of togetherness, but rather distinct attitudes of seeing-
together, knowing-together, etc. (this is Searle’s view), then these states are not
even higher-order. Some might remain sceptical concerning the ascription of

1
Cf. p. 15 and also Tomasello’s definition of collaborative activity (p. 172) which requires that
it involve multiple individuals with joint goals.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
240 S. Gross
known-together Gricean communicative intentions, which are at least 5th-order
(we know-together that I intend that you know that I intend that you know that P).
Phylogenetically, Tomasello hypothesizes that they emerged by the second, indirect
reciprocity stage, prior to the emergence of syntax sufficient for ascribing attitudes
(see below). Ontogenetically, his position is less clear. Some wording suggests
that he would ascribe such intentions to one-year-old infants, while underscoring
that they do not achieve an adult-like understanding of the states they are in until
several years later. But his position might rather be that they only have proto-
communicative intentions that contain some of the elements of the more mature
version (cf. pp. 130–5, 144–5).

2. Gesture First

Tomasello argues that at least the first two stages of cooperative communication’s
emergence (in mutualistic contexts and to secure reputation)—as well as the first
conventionalization of signs (on which, more below)—proceeded in the gestural,
not the vocal domain. One of his main grounds is again comparative. Great
ape vocalizations are highly genetically constrained, inflexible, and closely tied to
specific emotional states. Not so their gestures—at least some of them. These
gestures are learned, used for various communicative purposes, and under voluntary
control—in particular, deployed or not depending on their intended recipient’s
attentional state.2 They therefore already possess some features found in human
communication. Ape-like gestures among our ancestors would seem well-poised
for exploitation in early human collaborative activity. Ape-like vocalizations, on
the other hand, could only serve this expanding function if they were first brought
under voluntary control.
The simpler path does not settle the matter. Of course, at some point, vocalizations
in our lineage were brought under voluntary control. So, why not earlier rather
than later? Tomasello has a second argument for gestural origin—viz. that gesture
provides a better medium among humans for referential communication than
non-conventional vocalization. This is because pointing naturally directs human
attention to external targets, whereas vocalizations do not. (Neither does with non-
human primates.) Moreover, pantomiming, supported by our natural tendency to
infer intention, provides broader opportunities for successfully directing human

2 Tomasello distinguishes attention-getters and intention-movements. With the former—ground-

slapping, hand-clapping, etc.—an ape, having previously noticed the effects of such behaviours,
takes advantage of what naturally draws conspecifics’ attention in order to draw attention to
itself. The latter—e.g. back-touching in order to get mother to lower her back, arm-raising
in order to initiate play—emerge from a process of anticipatory foreshortening. A mother, for
instance, comes to anticipate her child’s attempts to climb up her back and so lowers herself at
the first touch; the child in turn comes to anticipate this and so simply produces the back-touch
gesture.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Origins of Human Communication: Tomasello 241
imagination than does vocal mimicry. Tomasello concludes that, since natural
communication preceded conventional communication (pp. 58–9), this provides
grounds for thinking that early human communication was gestural.
However, while it may be more likely that early human communication was
exclusively gestural rather than exclusively vocal, Tomasello’s second argument
does not preclude a mixed origin. A similar remark applies to Tomasello’s thought
experiment in support of the claim that it’s easier to imagine a path from natural
to conventionalized gestures than from unlearned to learned, conventional vocal-
izations. Tomasello asks the reader to imagine two groups of pre-linguistic human
children stranded on an island with their needs somehow arranged for. One group
has their mouths bound, the other their hands tied. Which is more likely to succeed
in communicating and to establish communicative conventions? But left out of the
thought experiment is a group that can use both their mouths and hands.3
Tomasello makes various other points regarding the gesture-first hypothesis.
I mention just one more. The human version of the FOXP2 gene, believed to be
implicated in fine motor control of speech articulators, reached fixation no more
than 150,000 years ago. According to Tomasello, this suggests that vocal dominance
emerged very late in the evolution of human communication. But the fixation date
is consistent with a mixed gestural-vocal origin and even with a long period of
vocal dominance prior to the mutation. It is tempting to add that 150,000 years
ago counts as late only relative to a question-begging timeline. But here one must
recall that Tomasello’s topic and thus his timeline encompasses the emergence of
cooperative communication generally, not just the emergence of language. In fact,
Tomasello hypothesizes that vocal dominance coincided with the (late) emergence
of conventional language with something like contemporary syntax.
Suppose human communication did have a gestural origin. Genetic enablers
aside, why and how did vocal communication come to dominate? Tomasello cites
various possible advantages others have suggested: it frees the hands for simultaneous
communication and manual manipulation; it frees the eyes for gathering environ-
mental information; it enables communication over longer distances, in the dark,
through dense forests, and around barriers; and so on. To this list of non-exclusive
candidates, Tomasello adds the fact that vocalization is arguably more public than
gesture, something that might have become advantageous once issues of reputation
became relevant to human groups.
Such speculations are exceedingly difficult to evaluate, both owing to the state
of the evidence and to the difficulty of modelling the candidates’ interactions
with other pressures. Moreover, they raise the question: if these factors are so

3 Arguably, young children begin vocalizing for the purpose of cooperative communication
around the same time they begin gesturing cooperatively (Clark, 2009, pp. 97–8)—even if, as
Tomasello notes (pp. 161–2), they begin verbalizing only afterwards. Indeed, the vocalizations
and gestures are often produced in tandem, just as shortly thereafter ‘many of children’s earliest
one-word utterances are actually combinations of pointing and language (as well as intonational
marking of motive)’ (p. 264). But of course one can’t read our phylogeny off our ontogeny.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
242 S. Gross
advantageous, why didn’t vocalization come to dominate from the start? The
most natural answer would posit changes in the fitness landscape, perhaps in part
brought about by the emergence of cooperative gestural communication itself.
Thus, regarding Tomasello’s suggestion, recall that the concern for reputation
emerges only in the second stage of his story.
As to how vocal dominance emerged, Tomasello proposes, without much devel-
opment, that vocalizations first piggy-backed on action-based gestures (pantomimes)
as emotional accompaniments and perhaps, once vocalization was brought under
voluntary control, as sound effects (e.g. mimicry of animal vocalizations). Insofar
as recipients came to associate gesture and sound and see them as redundant,
the vocalizations could come to function on their own as the gestures had—and
would do so if it were advantageous. Presumably, the use of specific vocalizations
would spread by cultural transmission, with biological adaptations perhaps over
time facilitating the whole process.
But even if this mechanism is part of the story, it’s unclear how it could suffice
to explain the emergence of vocal dominance. There are only so many distinct
vocal expressions of emotion and only so much vocal mimicry of which even
modern humans are capable (and only so many nameable things we associate with
distinctive sounds). Further mechanisms are needed for the creation and transmission
of novel vocal signs. Otherwise, for all that’s been argued, our capacity for creative
pantomime might outrun our capacity for redundant vocalization. Tomasello might
here simply invoke his tentative suggestion that there arose:

. . . some kind of general insight . . . that most of the communicative signs

we use have only arbitrary connections to their intended referents and social
intentions, and, so, voilà, we can if we want make up new arbitrary ones as
needed (p. 223).

3. Conventional Communication

A further distinctive feature of contemporary human communication is its exploita-

tion of conventionality. We use both basic signs and grammatical constructions that
are shared and arbitrary (in particular, non-iconic, unlike pantomimes). Tomasello’s
third main hypothesis concerns their emergence. He argues that, given the com-
municative use of natural gestures backed by shared intentionality, conventional
communication arose in large part as an emergent feature of human mechanisms of
cultural transmission.
For holophrastic signs—in particular, for the transition from pantomimes to
conventional gestures—Tomasello illustrates his proposed mechanism as follows.
A person pantomimes digging for tubers in the direction in which they are normally
found. Her cavemates understand that she thereby intends to communicate that
they should go dig tubers there. Some of them learn this gesture from her by role-
reversal imitation, so that there is now a shared communicative device. The gesture
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Origins of Human Communication: Tomasello 243
can then lose its iconicity if it is misconstrued by ‘some others not familiar with
digging, perhaps children’ (p. 223), who take it, say, to indicate leaving generally
and then imitatively use it themselves for that purpose.
It’s important that Tomasello has, not one, but some others misconstrue the
gesture; that they misconstrue it in the same way; and that the misconstrual isn’t
completely unrelated to the intended content (leaving to dig tubers is a kind of
leaving). These features raise the likelihood that a future use of the gesture with
the new purpose will succeed and thus catch on. The odds in any particular case
might remain low, but the account only requires that the mechanism sometimes leads
in this manner to loss of iconicity. If, however, there were mechanisms that did
not involve misconstruals, the odds might be significantly higher ceteris paribus (cf.
p. 296). Tomasello’s proposed mechanism might then be part of the story, but not
the only and perhaps not the main part. Tomasello’s discussion elsewhere indeed
suggests such alternative mechanisms. First, consider the replacement of gestures
by piggy-backed non-iconic vocalizations, mentioned above. This mechanism does
not require that the gesture be one that has itself already lost its iconicity (cf. pp. 234,
237, 241). It might be replied, however, that, for the same reasons we questioned
the prevalence of this process above, it’s unclear how many conventional signs
could have arisen this way. Second, there might be processes of gradual abstraction,
compression, etc. imposed by pressures for simpler production and enabled by
common ground and the familiarity bred by frequency (cf. below). If a digging
gesture can be construed as a gesture for leaving, as in Tomasello’s proposal, then
a gesture for digging so abstracted from more accurately pantomimed digging as to
have lost its iconicity for new users (perhaps it becomes just a downward wrist-flick
with palm faced upwards) can be learned by them as well.4 That said, since semantic
shifts of course do occur, there is no reason to doubt that Tomasello’s mechanism
is at least among the mechanisms involved in conventionalization.
What of grammatical conventions? Tomasello argues that sign-combinations
of increasing complexity emerged owing to functional pressures imposed by our
three main communicative motives (associated respectively with the three stages of
expanding cooperative communication mentioned above): requesting, informing,
and sharing emotions and attitudes. Basic requests in mutualistic contexts focus
on objects and actions in the here-and-now that can advance shared goals. Often
a single gesture (pantomimed drinking, to borrow an example from Tomasello)
can suffice, given common ground, for the recipient to discern communicative
intention (that the recipient should fill her a glass of water, as the case may be).
But in situations with multiple relevant objects and actions, there is pressure to
combine gestures in order to provide more information concerning desired events
and participants (e.g. one might pantomime drinking and point to a pitcher of

4 Tomasello (p. 223) does once refer to the digging gesture as ‘ritualized,’ but this is not given
any role in his account of how iconicity is lost. Indeed, Tomasello (pp. 223–4) argues that it’s
the loss of iconicity that allows for stylized, abstracted signs, rather than the other way around.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
244 S. Gross
water). With informing, there is pressure for devices that can help identify things
that are not present, indicate the relations among participants in events (who did
what to whom), and distinguish among speaker’s motives (e.g. requesting versus
informing). Finally, the motive of expressing and sharing emotions and attitudes,
particularly through narrative, introduces pressure for devices that enable relations
to be tracked across multiple events and participants.
Various devices can answer to these pressures, as witnessed by the multitude
found among extant languages. The first, on Tomasello’s account:

. . . were derived from ‘natural’ principles—that is, ones that all human beings
naturally employ based on their general cognitive, social, and motivational
propensities, such as ‘actor first’ or ‘topic first’ or looking puzzled when
asking for information—but the conventionalization process then transformed
these into communicatively significant syntactic devices in human cooperative
communication (p. 282).

Conventionalization, Tomasello argues, proceeds as follows. Successful combina-

tions are abstracted into shared constructions—structured schema with variable
slots for individual signs (cf. Tomasello’s (2003) usage-based account of language
acquisition). New constructions less directly tied to ‘natural’ principles then emerge
by processes of the sort linguists invoke to explain language change—e.g. grammat-
icalization. Among speakers with common ground, the use of a high frequency
shared construction increases the predictability of communicative intention. This,
given speakers’ tendency to expend the least effort necessary for successful commu-
nication, leads speakers to reduce the construction’s form. ‘He pulled the door and
it opened,’ for example, becomes the resultative construction ‘He pulled the door
open.’ Further changes introduced by slippage in the process of transmission can
then likewise move constructions further away from their ‘natural’ roots. Language
learners attempt to understand both the overall meaning of an utterance and the
contributions made by constituents. Tomasello provides an example in which their
success with the former involves a functional reanalysis regarding the latter:

. . . if a child hears an adult say ‘I’d better go,’ she might not hear the -’d so well
and just assume that better is a simple modal auxiliary like must, as in ‘I must
go’ . . . . if there are many similar children, at some historical point better will
indeed become a modal auxiliary like must in the English language at large
(pp. 304–5).

Note that this case does not involve a misconstrual of overall meaning (cf. above).
But nothing precludes such cases; and Tomasello cites the semantic shifts that
accompanied the grammaticalization of the future marker ‘gonna’ (pp. 302–3,
albeit while discussing reduction, not reanalysis in transmission).
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Origins of Human Communication: Tomasello 245
It will not go unnoticed that no mention has been made of innate language-
specific biases.5 Tomasello dismisses these in two brisk paragraphs, at least in the
case of syntax (pp. 311–3; for more, see Tomasello, 1995, 2003, and 2004). In his
view, general cognitive, social, and vocal-auditory constraints, together with shared
functional demands, suffice to explain, for example, linguistic universals. Of course,
the jury remains out on this contentious topic. So, it’s of interest to ask how much
of Tomasello’s view could be retained should his position on innate language-
specific biases prove mistaken. The answer, as far as I can see, is pretty much all
of it. Consider the common gradualist claim that innate language-specific biases
emerged via some version of the Baldwin Effect (e.g. Waddington, 1975; Pinker
and Bloom, 1990; and Jackendoff, 2002). On such views, the rise of conventional
communication alters the fitness landscape in a way that creates selective pressure for
mechanisms that ensure reliable and perhaps more rapid acquisition of the capacity
for conventional communication. Whether such effects could plausibly occur for
language, given, for example, how quickly particular languages themselves change,
is currently a central topic in computational modelling approaches to language
evolution (Briscoe, 2003, 2009; Christiansen and Chater, 2008). But, assuming they
can and did, the gradualist-nativist can nicely blend her account with Tomasello’s.
The processes Tomasello describes would account for the rise of conventional
communication—i.e. for what changed the fitness landscape so as to give rise to
innate language-specific biases. Those processes would continue to operate, albeit
now within the further constraints the biases impose. Of course, Tomasello’s story
may be consistent with innate language-specific biases while conflicting with more
specific proposals that incorporate them.
However this issue and the others mentioned above sort out, we can be grateful
to Tomasello for this engaging, highly stimulating book.

Department of Philosophy
Johns Hopkins University

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© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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