1:22 to 4:36 (3 min 14 sec, a bit past fair use, since the video isn't 32 minutes long, but I got the permission), and it's from this video:
Why Did Ancient Humans Learn to Talk — But Other Animals Didn’t?
Ami | 5 Sept. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACWMDECSNSw
First, enjoy his brilliant story-telling. It's actually a beautiful story in itself, if you accept the premisses of Evolutionary origin and suffering before sin and so on.
Go back to a time when your ancestors had no sentences at all. You're standing on a riverbank with a small group of ancient humans when someone spots a lion in the reeds and lets out a sharp bark of fear. Everyone scatters. That bark isn't a word. It's an emotional sound. The same kind of noise a startled baboon makes or you make when a plate slips out of your hands. It comes out of the body, not the mind.
But now watch the second time. The same person sees the same lion, points at the reads, and makes the same bark. And a few people who didn't see the lion look where the finger is pointing. That's the first tiny crack in the wall.
A sound plus a point. Attention aimed at a thing. Now run that scene a thousand times over a hundred years. The bark gets shorter and more deliberate.
People start using it before the lion is visible.
When they smell it or when they see flattened grass where it was sleeping. And here's the part that matters. The others still react. They're not reacting to a lion anymore. They're reacting to the sound that stands for one. That's a word being born. Nobody decided it. It just stuck.
Then it happens again with something else. One sound for the lion. A different sound maybe a soft repeated noise for the river. Another one for the sweet roots that grow near the marsh. Somebody's child copies the sounds wrong and gets corrected. Somebody from a neighbouring band marries in and brings a different noise for fire.
Over generations, a small pool of shared sounds forms. A kit of maybe a few dozen calls that everyone in the group understands the same way.
Every one of those sounds is still glued to a thing, but they belong to everybody. Now, that's the difference between a reflex and a vocabulary.
Here's where it gets interesting. A young woman reaches the ridge above you, out of breath. She makes the lion sound, then right after it, she makes the river sound. Two calls back to back, and the people below her don't hear two separate warnings. They hear one message, lion at the river. That is a bigger leap than it looks. A lion call and a river call were each complete on their own.
Put them together and a third meaning appears that neither one carried alone. She has just made something with words instead of just saying words. Once that trick exists, it spreads fast because it's useful.
Food there, water gone. Child fall. Two sound combinations turn into three. Someone works out that changing the order changes the meaning. You go is an instruction and go you is a shove.
Slowly across more generations than anyone could count. The combinations stop being fixed and start being flexible. You can plug new sounds into old patterns. That's a sentence. Not a fancy one.
But it's the first machine ancient humans ever built that made something out of nothing. And now watch the wall come down for real.
A man crouches by the fire holding up a hand axe, saying the sound for it. Fine. The next day, he says the same sound, and there's no axe anywhere in sight, and the person he's talking to walks off and comes back with one. The word just detached from its object. It floats.
For the first time, a human can put a thing into someone else's head that isn't in front of either of them. You can throw a word across a river, across a valley, across a lifetime.
But, time for analysis.
Go back to a time when your ancestors had no sentences at all. You're standing on a riverbank with a small group of ancient humans when someone spots a lion in the reeds and lets out a sharp bark of fear. Everyone scatters. That bark isn't a word. It's an emotional sound. The same kind of noise a startled baboon makes or you make when a plate slips out of your hands. It comes out of the body, not the mind.
The baboon and yourself are in very different positions. But in both cases, the sound actually comes out of the mind (or in the baboon's case, consciousness).
And in both cases it was learned. You will have learned that noise (possibly one of the words or phrases that get respelled with @#! and such extra characters in comic books) because your dad did it too. (Or your mum, but in that case you might be saying "fudge!")
The apes that live around lions have learned the danger signal too. It doesn't mean "lion" but "lion-danger, flee!" And if you are good at climbing "lion-danger, flee into the trees!" It is also pretty precisely one sound. It can be repeated, prolonged, but it doesn't alternate with different sounds in fixed series of sounds. It's the
one sound that carries the meaning.
But now watch the second time. The same person sees the same lion, points at the reeds, and makes the same bark. And a few people who didn't see the lion look where the finger is pointing. That's the first tiny crack in the wall.
Already, where do we arrive at a pointing finger being anything other than a command or a threat, as it is to apes?
Again, apes also use danger calls to people not seeing the lion ... well, not people, but it would kind of have been if our ancestors had been there.
A sound plus a point. Attention aimed at a thing. Now run that scene a thousand times over a hundred years. The bark gets shorter and more deliberate.
Why would it? Words in human languages do become shorter, and to some that may come off as "more deliberate" though I might disagree. To me "ek Hlewagastiz holtingaz" doesn't come off as hesitating, but as thoughtful, but you do you. Whether it's more deliberate or not, the cognates in modern Swedish are certainly shorter: "jag Lägest hölting" ... in English it might be "I Leaguest holting" also shorter. However, the reason why a word can change sounds and get shorter is, the word consisted of different sounds to begin with, and whenever a sound disappeared or changed, the surrounding or otherwise other sounds in the word were sufficient to carry on the meaning. Even regular sound changes get tweaked once a word is on the verge of becoming confused with another one. My favourite go to is when Latin "solem" and "solum" (Sun and soil) were both going to "sol" (in French, this only means soil), and the word for Sun was exchanged for a longer one, which in Latin would have been "soliculum" and in French is "soleil" ... as long as a meaning is tied to a single sound, it
can't change. Lion in English is [l ai @ n] and used to be [l i: o n] and both the diphthongisation of the first vowel and the smudging of the second one are only possible because of the surrounding sounds. This can't happen to a "bark" ...
People start using it before the lion is visible.
When they smell it or when they see flattened grass where it was sleeping. And here's the part that matters. The others still react. They're not reacting to a lion anymore. They're reacting to the sound that stands for one. That's a word being born. Nobody decided it. It just stuck.
Apart from the pointing, which I find dubious in anyone who inherited apelike communications, all of this is perfectly within the scope of what ape already have. You know in the rest of the video, apes are described as incapable of comprehending pointing as an offer or demand for information.
Then it happens again with something else. One sound for the lion. A different sound maybe a soft repeated noise for the river. Another one for the sweet roots that grow near the marsh. Somebody's child copies the sounds wrong and gets corrected. Somebody from a neighbouring band marries in and brings a different noise for fire.
Why would they have sounds for these things? Remember, it's a question of warning signals and also other emotionally and pragmatically cued signals.
And the way to express an intention to go and pick things for eating wouldn't be to designate a specific food item, but to either start grubbing for the roots or lifting hands to apples or do some gesture or sound of impatience to signal one should start or oneself intends to start. The only signal in which the river might fit would be sth like "let's take a bath!" Or if the context were "don't drown, don't fall in" that would also make sense.
Over generations, a small pool of shared sounds forms. A kit of maybe a few dozen calls that everyone in the group understands the same way.
Apes already have that. In principle it could be up to 500 items, ranging from the equivalent of traffic signals ("lion, flee-into-trees") to emotica ("how are you?"—"I'm fine!"*). In many cases, it's the tone or the gestures that do it.
Every one of those sounds is still glued to a thing, but they belong to everybody. Now, that's the difference between a reflex and a vocabulary.
It was never a pure reflex in the first place and there was no explanation why sounds become attached to
things rather than to pragmatic and emotional
situations.
Here's where it gets interesting. A young woman reaches the ridge above you, out of breath. She makes the lion sound, then right after it, she makes the river sound. Two calls back to back, and the people below her don't hear two separate warnings. They hear one message, lion at the river. That is a bigger leap than it looks. A lion call and a river call were each complete on their own.
They would presumably, if raised on ape communications have heard "don't fall in, don't drown" and "flee into the trees" ...
Put them together and a third meaning appears that neither one carried alone. She has just made something with words instead of just saying words. Once that trick exists, it spreads fast because it's useful.
In order for the trick to exist at all, one would need to have meanings like "lion" and "river" and not like "don't drown" and "flee into the trees"
Food there, water gone. Child fall. Two sound combinations turn into three. Someone works out that changing the order changes the meaning. You go is an instruction and go you is a shove.
Slowly across more generations than anyone could count. The combinations stop being fixed and start being flexible. You can plug new sounds into old patterns. That's a sentence. Not a fancy one.
The reason they are flexible is, they are sentences. The reason they are sentences is, they are made up out of words, that are in themselves incomplete in situational meaning and complete each other as a way of giving mainly information. And in order to do that, you need to have way more words than there are emotional or pragmatic situations (which already had their "words" and shouldn't lose them, remember!), but for that to happen, you'd need words to be made up of smaller sound units in themselves not meaningful, only distinguishing between meanings. Remember why the "bark" for "lion-danger, flee into the trees!" can't become a neat word that simply means "lion" ...
But it's the first machine ancient humans ever built that made something out of nothing. And now watch the wall come down for real.
A man crouches by the fire holding up a hand axe, saying the sound for it. Fine. The next day, he says the same sound, and there's no axe anywhere in sight, and the person he's talking to walks off and comes back with one. The word just detached from its object. It floats.
Supposing any creature ever had hand axes before language, the hand axe would still be in the situation, since the person using the word would have been asking for one or for the same one as yesterday, to be produced.
This is miles away from talking about hand axes that are absent from the situation.
For the first time, a human can put a thing into someone else's head that isn't in front of either of them. You can throw a word across a river, across a valley, across a lifetime.
I frankly don't think this example works for all of this buildup. You can ask for a hand axe, but presumably some apes have asked for oranges where none were in sight. The ape** cannot throw the sign for orange across his lifetime, if he signs "orange" he means "give me an orange" and not necessarily adding any "pretty please" ...
In other words, "mission statement: invent human language" and "mission report: mission not accomplished".
However, if instead God created Adam and infused language, that mission wouldn't have been needed in the first place. That's why either eternity of mankind (impossible in a universe that began) or mankind created by an eternal are superior explanations for language over man evolving and inventing language. And that eternal that gave men language, we Christians identify as the Triune God.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Matthew
21.IX.2026
In Aethiopia natalis sancti Matthaei, Apostoli et Evangelistae; qui, in ea regione praedicans, martyrium passus est. Hujus Evangelium, Hebraeo sermone conscriptum, ipso Matthaeo revelante, inventum est, una cum corpore beati Barnabae Apostoli, tempore Zenonis Imperatoris.
* You may imagine that someone who's reducing conversations with me to those items, to me comes off as dehumanising. ** Like taught sign language.
