WI Non-Human Animal w Language

I got to thinking about this from this guy talking about the history of the universe.

What if there was a non-hominid land animal (vertebrate, preferably mammal) that had language capabilities, especially with regard to cultural transmission, of human level complexity (so also having elements like displacement)? For simplicities sake, let's say they initially evolve far from humanity's initial growth (so at the very least not affecting the course of, say, the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of the first "civilizations"). Aside from their brains, they don't have much in the way of humanity's physical advantages (opposable thumbs, hairless bodies, size, etc), but preferably is capable of establishing itself in many habitats the world over if they're introduced -- so they can be rodents, lagomorphs, carnivores (like hyper-intelligent cats or dogs), or something like that.

First, how would such an animal (in terms of behavior, etc) appear? What would be the tell tale signs of such a linguistic capability, and what advantages would it confer upon a species that otherwise couldn't engage in things like complex tool use?

Second -- and most germane to Alternate History -- how would humanity interact with such a species when they come in contact? Could said intelligent species be domesticated, and to what use? And what possibilities arise when (and if) one human or another learns to understand said animal language, or make said animal understand human language?

It's difficult to imagine domestication of a species which we recognise as being similar to us in terms of intelligence (unless you're the Draka!), but if we have physical advantages over them some sort of slavery is quite possible, even likely. Probably would do wonders for human solidarity of the plus side though.

Well, arguably some sea mammals (mainly Delphinoidea) are quite close to human-level complexity in language. It's not the case with any land mammal I know of, but elephants and some primates like the cercopitecines have a decent shot.
Also, some birds like crows and parrots have shown surprisingly sophisticated language abilities, though nowhere near human or cetaceans levels AFAIK.
An important point is establishing why linguistic ability evolves. It usually implies complex social structure, which is relatively common among land mammals. Actually, there many animals that show some degree of cultural transmission, including most primates, mice, a good number of carnivores, proboscidates, and some bats. Bats also feature ecolocation, which is the basis for evolution of "language" in cetaceans.

Falecius said:

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Maybe it would help if "human level complexity" was bettered defined, particularly as it relates to cultural transmission? What I'm thinking of is an animal language that can both communicate abstract ideas (or at least displaced ones), communicated by animals capable of remembering and teaching them. So a dog teaching a pup to hunt doesn't cut it, since he does this by showing, unless he can do it without ever taking on prey in the presence of his student.

A far shorter clarification -- I'm essentially asking "What if one of the animals could tell each other stories?"

John Fredrick Parker said:

Maybe it would help if "human level complexity" was bettered defined, particularly as it relates to cultural transmission? What I'm thinking of is an animal language that can both communicate abstract ideas (or at least displaced ones), communicated by animals capable of remembering and teaching them. So a dog teaching a pup to hunt doesn't cut it, since he does this by showing, unless he can do it without ever taking on prey in the presence of his student.

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You're definitely on the spot. Communications in apes and monkeys are usually tied to one function: to direct or manipulate the behavior of others. They may produce complex vocal patterns and great melodic/rhythmic variations, sometimes even compounded with gestures. However their 'language' are primarily manipulative and holistic, rather than referential and segmental (Think about using only a piece of music to express 'You go to the enemy's front to distract them, I stay here to ambush them', make you wonder about the Neanderthals, eh?). The latter much required for conceptual transmission, descriptions of complex social levels, etc.

To a lesser extent, you may also want to consider as to how exactly would be the technical means of their communications since the ability of humans to produce language have developed under very specific constraints. For example, to consider only the evolution of human physiology: 2 million years ago, the shape of vocal tracts in the ancestors of humans started to change following their change of lifestyle. The vocal tract became smaller from their shift to meat eating, as long as a thicker tongue that allowed fine muscular control and production of more complex phonemes like the fricative sounds (e.g. -f). Most importantly, the larynx lowered so as to form a tube shaped like an inverted L. Now, think about a clarinet and French horn: the standard Mammalian plan with the straight vocal cavity, like horses, can only produce sounds with simpler timbre like a clarinet. Human vocal tract is obviously not as convoluted as a French horn, but its bent is required for the variation we observe in human speech. (That was why they failed to teach chimpanzees to talk; they simply couldn't.) Also, for an animal which develops a language, primarily making use of the motor mode, like a sign language, may just be as likely as using vocalizations. Hands in humans serving the secondary function (gesturing) may well be a peculiarity.

It is an interesting challenge because it asks us to understand both the question of how language developed among us, and the question of whether creatures that don't have our physically manipulative abilities could nevertheless also develop language.

I found Steven Mithin's Singing Neanderthals a provocative model of just how humans developed language as a tool of communication. In terms of how to get from generic mammal to speech as an innate ability, the sequence he suggests is something like:

Bipedalism demands expansion of brain centers devoted to achieving balance; expanded poise interacts with the rest of the brain in a social species to achieve expressivity via dance; dance plus vocalized signs (common among many mammals) leads to transpostion of dance-like complexity to the verbal range in the form of song and musicality; music in the context of a manipulative social species crystallizes as it were into structured language in the modern H. Sapiens species (but not yet--nor ever, once we drive them into extinction!) of our cousin hominid species. Hence, Neanderthals sing, but don't speak.

A bit over 20 years ago, I was a devotee of reading Scientific American (until it mutated into a more glitzy form) and around that time, the magazine had a spate of interesting articles relating to human psychology; these articles and the thoughts they provoked in me have a lot to do with my notions of just what the human mind is.

It was in that same period the magazine published an article on an African Gray Parrot which had been taught speech by an unusual method, and appeared to demonstrate the ability not merely to mimic sounds, but to construct simple sentences in a way that indicated contextual understanding of meaning. Parrots are generally taught by means of reward conditioning to utter catchphrases but these scientists attempted to immerse this bird in situational and contextual learning of language analogous to the way human children learn. The most striking example of the bird's actual understanding of word meanings I recall was that it coined a new term for almonds (parrots like to eat nuts)--it called them "cork nuts!"

Now, if a bird like a parrot or crow can indeed process words and perhaps grammar to arrive at an understanding of the meanings of speech, that's certainly food for thought! I'm not sure why or how parrots got the brain power, but they are sort of an avian equivalent of monkeys, living in trees and doing quite a lot of manipulation with their somewhat hand-like feet and their beak. Crows are more social and perhaps cooperative, and they too are rather infamously manipulative. Perhaps the extensive poise needed for flight and bipedalism on the ground have something to do with bird's general proclivity for song? Of course neither crows nor parrots are known as songbirds!

Could some species like pack canines, wolves for instance, develop a use for speech by a different path that doesn't include the poise-leads-to-dance-leads -to-music model Mithin suggests for hominids? I don't know, but for animals like birds with their major premium on minimizing body weight which goes against developing an ounce of brainpower they don't actually need nevertheless to develop an ability to have something like speech suggests maybe language is not that hard a trick after all. (Or that brain processing power can be arrived at more efficiently than the way it is done with mammals!)

I'm thinking of American animals for this challenge, so the encounter between them and our species comes late--parrots count. Corvids--I'm not sure what their ranges are, but I suspect they do have branches in Africa so the interactive butterflies might be a risk there.

Some kind of American pack canines--I wonder if a species of small canines, like foxes but with bigger brains, might develop brainpower as an equalizer versus bigger ones like wolves. Bigger bodies generally support bigger brains, so the big wolves might still have the advantage here. Why they should develop such a complex and open-ended mode of communication as speech when much simpler systems work fine for known species is an open question of course.

We might go really weird and have it happen among marsupials in Australia, but then there's the grave danger that either the early Aboriginals or the European invasion might drive them to extinction. American animals would have more range to retreat to, allowing more time for some kind of relationship between humans and them to evolve.

Canines certainly might come to some kind of domestication or mutualism.

Talking cats, who are social pack hunters before meeting humans, is a wilder idea that goes out on more limbs.

It's not at all clear to me how herbivores like rabbits or horses would go down this path, but who knows?

Most mammals would require a lot of evolution of their vocal systems before they could manage the range of human speech. Birds I guess inherit a generally wide range of vocalization from the general tendency of them to sing, which opens up an opportunistic door for the brighter species to dabble in speech I guess.

Corvids and parrots are possibilities, as are dolphins and elephants, as pointed out.

Octopuses might be another, long shot possibility.

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

Corvids and parrots are possibilities, as are dolphins and elephants, as pointed out.

Octopuses might be another, long shot possibility.

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I can imagine octopuses doing many interesting things, but how could they talk? They live underwater!

Also the OP specifies a vertebrate land animal, so cephalopods are out on two counts.

Of course there's the wacky notion of some variation of them somehow moving onto land, then they'd have to breathe air I guess and might make sounds. OTOH, I believe the whole phylum is completely deaf, they have no organs designed to pick up sound at all. (I guess in water they can and do feel pressure waves, but that diffuse approach to hearing won't do them much good in air).

So in addition to devising a new respiratory system, and somehow coping with gravity (evolving a cuttlebone type skeleton? A "system of bladders" like Kif from Futurama?) and the dangers of dehydration and water of variable salinity (such as the practically zero salinity of rainwater) to come close to the OP challenge (never mind they are disqualified by not being chordates) they have to evolve a whole new sense and also somehow modulate their breathing (or resonate their supportive air bladders, or something) to make sounds to speak.

If we somehow did have land-dwelling higher mollusks with tentacles, I'd think they'd develop a sort of sign language and vary their pigmentation for signalling, the way they do under water. Though enough evolution to enable them to survive on land at all very possibly would also involve both time and selective pressures to develop a form of hearing and perhaps articulation.

Would language be a prerequisite to possible civilization or simply greater organization?

M79 said:

Would language be a prerequisite to possible civilization or simply greater organization?

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'Prerequisite' implies causality, so even though it's very likely to be facilitative of the process, I won't go all out to claim that (it also sounds somewhat Whorfian to me). But at the very least the capacity and complexity that give rise to language could easily be crucial to reach the threshold levels of cognitive power needed to form organization beyond a territorial community, i.e. they're correlational.

I wonder would the talking species in question be localized on some isolated areas/islands or global-trotting, and when in the stage of human civilization would be the time of first contact? I would imagine that if the physiological constraint permits acquiring of each other's language, the interaction and effect on human history would invariably be much larger.

Shevek23 said:

I can imagine octopuses doing many interesting things, but how could they talk? They live underwater!

Also the OP specifies a vertebrate land animal, so cephalopods are out on two counts.

Of course there's the wacky notion of some variation of them somehow moving onto land, then they'd have to breathe air I guess and might make sounds. OTOH, I believe the whole phylum is completely deaf, they have no organs designed to pick up sound at all. (I guess in water they can and do feel pressure waves, but that diffuse approach to hearing won't do them much good in air).

So in addition to devising a new respiratory system, and somehow coping with gravity (evolving a cuttlebone type skeleton? A "system of bladders" like Kif from Futurama?) and the dangers of dehydration and water of variable salinity (such as the practically zero salinity of rainwater) to come close to the OP challenge (never mind they are disqualified by not being chordates) they have to evolve a whole new sense and also somehow modulate their breathing (or resonate their supportive air bladders, or something) to make sounds to speak.

If we somehow did have land-dwelling higher mollusks with tentacles, I'd think they'd develop a sort of sign language and vary their pigmentation for signalling, the way they do under water. Though enough evolution to enable them to survive on land at all very possibly would also involve both time and selective pressures to develop a form of hearing and perhaps articulation.

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If they evolve a language underwater, it would be probably made of color patterns on their skin. Some octopuses are incredibly versatile at manipulating that and it's been suggested that they large brains are connected with their sophisticated mimetism.

Wouldn't something like a raccoon fit this bill? They have grasping front paws, an excellent sense of touch, omnivorous, and are rather intelligent. There's no reason why they couldn't evolve in a direction that would develop speach etc...

Analytical Engine said:

Wouldn't something like a raccoon fit this bill? They have grasping front paws, an excellent sense of touch, omnivorous, and are rather intelligent. There's no reason why they couldn't evolve in a direction that would develop speach etc...

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And they originate in North America, a fair old distance from the initial centres of human civilisation in the Middle East and China, not to mention the East African Rift Valley cradle of the Human Race. Procyon Sapiens relationship with the ancestors of the OTL Native Americans as they migrated in over the Bering land bridge would be very interesting......

And what if Procyon Sapiens migrated in the opposite direction!

Here's a related idea -- what if, sometime in the latter 20th Century, it was discovered that a certain animal (or perhaps more than one) had a language that was at least as roughly complex as that of humans? Say it was an animal with large, interconnected populations (as opposed to families isolated from one another), and that many, in fact, have shared oral traditions (what we might call "legends" or "histories").

What really interests me about such a scenario is thinking what (parts of) human history and development might look like from a non-human perspective -- not just to an animal "out there in nature" (since that'd be predictable -- basically just seeing human expansion and growth as a plight), but one that managed to thrive in the face of human growth (like squirrels, mice, or maybe raccoons), and possibly even have already found a place in human societies (ie domesticated animals, like cats or dogs).

Oh, and just to be clear -- they understand us as little as we initially understood them, so they won't have any "Great Man of History" approach, at least to our species (though that's not to say they couldn't have a "Great Squirrel of History" or some such theory).

I see language as part of a complex of abilities that includes the ability to manipulate the environment, by a combination of individual actions via intelligent social cooperation. I don't see how it could be favored to evolve in another context. What is the point of investing in the brain power to communicate in such an open-ended way if the species is not going to transform its way of living the way ours has? Brainpower costs, in biological terms, there has to be a payoff to justify its liabilities.

The amazing thing about the real-world examples we've mentioned here is, how much is accomplished with how little. Parrots and crows don't have brains as relatively gigantic compared to their body mass as we have, nor do they have technical accomplishments as spectacular as our cumulative works. Maybe language is cheaper in evolutionary terms than I can believe.

Still I'd think a species with true language would interact with humanity from first contact in a different way than other animals; even if it took until our lifetimes for actual cross-species communication to be established it would be apparent to both sides from the beginning that the other species was something special.

If they were cetaceans, or octopuses, living in an environment we don't have access to such as the oceans, then I could see the mutual realization of each others' statuses as waiting until the past couple of centuries, but that's not the challenge.

I can and have imagined the possibility of a language-using species whose individual members aren't very bright; it's actually rather a staple of science fiction to imagine hive species where the locus of self-reflective intelligence is not in any individual but in the collective itself--hive species. What if we met very bright termite mounds, or warrens of something like naked mole rats? There though the "language" involved is not going to be like a human language, rather it's a stereotyped biologically evolved code that allows information to be efficiently shared and processed collectively, each small animal somehow contributing to a whole of parsed information that is then acted on, again with the plan and methods of execution being somehow conceived as a shared interaction of many small minds rather than as an idea emerging in one individual.

So that wouldn't be the challenge either.

If we want language as meaningful and flexible as human languages are, we need individuals as capable as we are of understanding the meaning of what they are saying and hearing. Such individuals living on land would be quick to see the implications of human patterns of organization, and we in turn would observe sophisticated organization among them telling us that the squirrels, raccoons or whatever are people in ways that other animals aren't. I don't see how they'd infiltrate the human world without being noticed.

Analytical Engine said:

Wouldn't something like a raccoon fit this bill? They have grasping front paws, an excellent sense of touch, omnivorous, and are rather intelligent. There's no reason why they couldn't evolve in a direction that would develop speach etc...

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For Procyon sapiens, see Metazoica and click yourself through the site! Very interesting for anything related to the far future (or geological past)!

PiratePartyist said:

For Procyon sapiens, see Metazoica and click yourself through the site! Very interesting for anything related to the far future (or geological past)!

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See also the great sf book ,,architect of sleep,, by steven boyett. Great book, unfortunately, it was meant to be part of a duology and the publisher didnt pick up the second half. Sigh.