How food fueled language, Part II: language genres, songs in the head, and the coevolution of cooking and language

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how cooking and language emerged and coevolved as drivers of human creativity. Through this dynamic coevolutionary process, shifts in diet affected demographics, which increased social and cognitive complexity, leading to new technological and social innovations, and eventually genetic changes. A work of interdisciplinary synthesis, this paper combines work from diverse fields including anthropology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary syntax, genre studies, neuroscience, and paleoethnobotany. A key contribution from genres studies is that the emergence of language allowed for a proliferation of linguistic genres (referred to collectively as proto-poetry), and that earworms, or songs stuck in the head, are likely cognitive fossils of these first proto-poems that evolved to enhance working memory and recursive thought. The argument proposed here hinges on the beliefs that in order to better understand how language first arose, we need to ask what the first words were about, and that food was likely the subject around which language first gravitated. Language is a cultural tool that emerged from our interactions with our environment, and food is a very important aspect of that environment. This paper is part two of a two-part article.

KEYWORDS:

• Coevolution
• cooking
• genre
• involuntary musical imagery
• language
• recursion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This echoes the ecological ungrounding account of language development outlined by Raczaszek-Leonardi et al. (2018) and Deacon (2016), in which language emerges in co-action with a learned social physics that includes informative actions such as gazes, movements, gestures, and vocalizations.

2. Zwir et al. (2021) found that, compared to chimpanzees and Neandertals, humans have a significantly overexpressed suit of genes for creativity including networks of genes for the regulation of emotional reactivity, self-control, and self-awareness.

3. The engine driving gene–culture coevolution needs to account for several facts: innovations likely lead to population growth and not the other way around (Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger 2009, 218); symbolic material culture must be accounted for as a by-product of increasingly complex social interactions, ‘resulting from demographic growth facilitated by technological progress and increasing adaptive success’ (Zilhão 2012, 46); decline of hominin population during the Middle Paleolithic does not correlate with glacial cycles (Kuhn 2012, 75) (note: decline in population could be due to disease, which occurred frequently during the development of agriculture, as outlined in Scott’s [2017] Against the Grain); and neither do changes in brain size track with patterns of increased environmental variability (Shultz, Nelson, and Dunbar 2012, 2136), implying that hominins were already very creative at surviving in difficult and changing environments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jake Young

Jake Young specializes in the craft, theory, and history of poetry and poetics, as well as the intersections of food, drink, and literature. He is the author of three collections of poetry and one nonfiction collection, and serves as the poetry editor for the Chicago Quarterly Review. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University and his PhD in English from the University of Missouri. He is a MacLean Center Clinical Medical Ethics Fellow and an MPH Candidate (2022) at the University of Chicago.