Information relies for its transmission on receivers that understand the way in which it is represented. If cultural information is represented in the languages of human culture, then its transmission depends on humans who can understand those languages. This chapter explores the innate characteristics that needed to be in place before our species was ready for the most complex, yet also most widely shared, representational system that we know: natural language. It shows how the preadaptations that prepared the way for language evolution were also preadaptations for culture.

I divide human languages into two types. Spoken and sign languages, which have evolved naturally as a means of communication among people, are collectively known as natural language. For languages such as the written word, musical notation or the conventions of architectural drawings, which are realized in objects made or fashioned by humans, I coin the collective phrase “artefactual language.” My thesis is that cultural information is represented in a variety of media, in both natural and artefactual languages, and that this information encodes for the phenotypic effects that we call culture.

Humans have a unique capacity for the acquisition and use of language. There are many different natural languages, both ancient (like Latin) and modern (like English), but underlying them all is the same human language faculty. What are its evolutionary origins?