I have great respect for the British popular science weekly New Scientist, which is much sharper than the Scientific American that I’ve been getting since Junior High, and I think it is legitimate to accept its judgments as those of the world scientific community. This Chronicle focuses on this community’s failure to recognize the foundational basis of human language that distinguishes its signs, words, from such phenomena as the warning signals of animals. It follows up on Chronicle 853, where I discussed two earlier New Scientist articles that likewise failed to recognize the specificity of human language.
On page 9 of the 11 October 2025 issue, Chris Simms’ article “Birds may share universal warning call” begins, and ends, thus:
More than 20 species of bird around the world use a similar “whining” alarm call to warn that birds like cuckoos are around. The call seems to be understood across species, and its specific use hints at how language may have originated.
[…]
Calls often have specific meanings, and in some cases, they refer to external objects or events, rather than merely communicating about internal states like fear, or attributes like sex or species,” says Rob Magrath at the Australian National University in Canberra.
“This referentiality means that such calls are akin to human words, which often refer to external objects or events,” he says. “So, animal communication and human language appear to be on a continuum, rather than ‘language’ being a uniquely human feature.” [emphasis mine]
The idea that human language originated in (animal) alarm calls is simply false, and we need only refer once more to Terrence Deacon’s Symbolic Species, which locates words and alarm calls of this sort in different locations in the human brain.
But the point that must be made explicitly is that the words of human language are, in contrast to “instinctive” reactions such as alarm calls, mediated through consciousness, in a sense that only humans possess; consciousness/conscience that is at the root of our moral intuition of right and wrong, and that, rather than reflexively inciting other members of our own or other species to flee a potential source of danger or to move toward a source of benefits, human language originates as the result of the speaker’s decision to defer/renounce the attempt to appropriate a desirable object, and instead to refer to it by a sign in order to communicate this renunciation to his fellows. In other words, the originary sign—which we can conceive as an ostensive gesture, or pointing—is a conscious mark of self-restraint intended to induce the same behavior in its recipients. (Let me refer once more to my example of two party-goers hesitating after simultaneously reaching for the last canapé on a tray; see Chronicle 710.)
Unfortunately, this thesis, which succinctly defines the “Rubicon” that separates the human from the animal, has remained virtually invisible to the scientific community. That human language and conscience/religion were born simultaneously, coevally in the term of Roy Rappaport (see Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge, 1999), remains “unproven,” the universality of the two phenomena in all known human societies being considered an illegitimate subject for explanation in the absence of concrete archaeological evidence.
Nonetheless, it is useful to provide a conjectural anthropological basis for these assertions—a basis which, I will repeat once more, is grounded not in the clinical laboratory but in literary research. I refer to René Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire in his epoch-making 1961 Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (in English, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel), which characterizes the “truth” of the modern novel as the overcoming of the “romantic lie” of the self-substantial nature of the romantic ego.
It is significant that this fundamental anthropological analysis that points the way to a hypothesis of human origin emerged from “French Theory,” a social science-influenced mode of literary analysis that reached its heights in the last decades of the 20th century, and is now all but defunct. These analyses were authored by anthropologists, psychoanalysts and linguists as well as by literary scholars influenced by their writings.
Nor is it an accident that Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, perhaps French Theory’s most significant contribution to anthropology, was the work of someone whose studies began in the domain of religion and turned from there to literature—someone whom one might imagine to be especially suited to explore Rappaport’s coevality.
Girard’s insight, gleaned from his reading of a series of modern novels as accounts of spiritual odysseys derived from their authors’ own journeys of self-discovery, was that human desire, in contrast with the appetitive drive of animals, is profoundly influenced by the example of their fellows. To which I would add that implicit in Girard’s analysis is the intuition that it is this characteristic that is the basis for the emergence of the new level of consciousness that humanity represents: one that, precisely, is defined jointly by the coeval emergence of language and religion.
Girard himself never addresses the question of human origin, but his depiction of the modern novel as a search for personal authenticity based on the self’s escape from the passivity of mimetic desire describes the exemplary lives of literary protagonists as stories of liberation and accession to a level of authenticity that, as in Girard’s final example, Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is a kind of religious epiphany. This effect is also provided by Le temps retrouvé, the final volume of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, which ends with the protagonist preparing to write the novel of his liberation—which we have just finished reading.
All well and good, you might say, but what does this have to do with the origin of language and religion?
What it has to do is that, from the beginning, human language is not exemplified by bird’s or, for that matter, human’s distress calls, which have no need for consciousness to exercise their effect. For this effect is strictly “Pavlovian,” instinctual—like pulling your hand away from a hot stove. What distinguishes human language from animal communication is that it is necessarily the result of a conscious, moral decision.
How can we explain this? The explanation is supplied by Girard’s idea that humans do not merely have appetites, but desires, which differ from them by the fact that they are influenced by—indeed, imitate—the desires of others. And this influence is too powerful, and too close to consciousness, to be countered by reflexive, Pavlovian inhibitions. We must consciously inhibit our desires—which, as we recall from the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, means that this inhibition may not necessarily take place, resulting in the possibility of conflict with another, or others, who share the same desire—or with God, the source of the moral order itself.
Generative anthropology’s originary hypothesis is a scenario in which this conscious inhibition provides the gestural material for the first human sign, or word, which would consist simply in an ostensive gesture; in pointing. For, as Michael Tomasello and others have pointed out, the “joint shared attention” involved in pointing at something so that another will direct his attention to it is not practiced by animals. It is an exclusively human phenomenon, immortalized in the Zen koan: Look at the moon, not at my finger.
And as for the origin of this new use of pointing, the originary hypothesis proposes that the pointing gesture originates as an aborted gesture of appropriation—reaching for an object, but breaking off the attempt to possess it on seeing another or others doing the same thing. For all cannot at once possess the object—but they can all point to it, designate it, refer to it: make it the referent of an ostensive, which is hypothetically the first linguistic sign.
And as a consequence, the sign, in contrast to the appropriative gesture, can be simultaneously shared by any number of individuals. Hence its first appearance can be hypothesized to take place in a collective situation—for example, one in which the serial distribution practiced by apes, familiar through the Alpha-Beta-Gamma nomenclature its students have applied to it, in which the Alpha takes the cadaver of a hunted or scavenged animal, tears off his piece, then passes the rest to the Beta… has become, as a result of the intensification of mimetic desire with growing proto-human intelligence, no longer effective, its reflexive hierarchy breaking down in conflict. In this context, the discovery of the sign as a conscious replacement of the act of appropriation allows the group to maintain its symmetry, eventually leading to the quasi-simultaneous egalitarian sharing of the meat among the group, the common means of distribution among elementary hunter-gatherer societies—and with superficial changes, the pattern of collective human repasts ever since.
Furthermore, the emergence of this system must be understood to be dependent on a conscious moral judgment that, at a stage of human culture prior to the institution of social hierarchy, any individual attempt to preempt this egalitarian distribution by “un-aborting” his original appropriative gesture would be not simply dangerous to the individual in question, but wrong. This moral judgment, that no one should disobey the principle of egalitarian distribution, is plausibly the originary source of what later came to be known as the Golden Rule, which, in Hillel’s original formation, was expressed negatively as “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow!”—to which he added, “That is the whole Torah; the rest is Commentary.” Or in other terms, the Golden Rule is the foundational principle of the sacred, the basis of all religion.
To sum up, the origin of religion, beginning with moral judgment, and language, beginning with an ostensive sign, both exemplify what I have simply called deferral, following Jacques Derrida’s French pun différance, which plays on the dual definition of différer as both to differ and to defer. Or in a word, the conquest of instinct by reflective judgment. Language as a behavior which, rather than either fleeing or grasping its object, is content to refer to it, which is to say, to point it out to others; and the sacred, which inspires in us a moral judgment that appropriating the group’s common object of desire is not just dangerous, but wrong.
To be human is to hesitate, to defer, to abort our gesture of appropriation—yet to retain this aborted gesture not as a failed act, but transformed into a sign that informs our fellows that we too desire the object, but are aware that it would be wrong to grasp it, since we are all in the same circumstances: in which the sign can be shared, but not (yet) its object, which we must learn to divide in more or less equal portions for each member of the group.
And the use of such a sign, even from the very first, links its human users in a collective scene of mutual awareness, the origin of what we may broadly call human culture, with its locales such as theaters and assemblies, as well as the now-ubiquitous screens on which, since the Lumières’ first cinema show in 1895, we increasingly display such scenes to each other and ourselves.