ORIGINAL ARTICLE Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language Kim Sterelny 1 Received: 10 November 2015 / Accepted: 15 June 2016 Ó Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research 2016 Abstract In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evo- lution of full human language, the transition from so-called ‘‘protolanguage’’ to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced refer- ence; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also (perhaps more importantly) defends and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulative cultural evolution—and while we rarely have direct infor- mation about communication, we have more direct infor- mation about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities (on which rich communication depends) and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary his- tory during which we became lingual. Keywords Communication and cooperation Á Cumulative cultural evolution Á Evolution of language Á Gestural origins of language Á Protolanguage to language transition Introduction: Aims and Assumptions Views on language evolution are profoundly constrained by views on its nature, and as a consequence there are two broad traditions of thought and work on the evolution of language. One tradition is framed around Chomsky’s conception of language. This view takes the most central, defining characteristic of language to be its computational architecture; a recursive procedure that generates sentences from words, and from structured combinations of words. An important aspect of this generative view of language is that sentences are hierarchical organized structures, not just strings of words. In virtue of this computational compe- tence, languages are unbounded, despite their finite lexi- cons. 1 As this tradition sees it, the decisive difference between language-enabled minds and language-less minds is computational. This view of the essential nature of lan- guage is taken to have the following corollaries: (1) It is universalist. The different languages do not differ in fun- damental ways; nor (except for rare, pathological individ- uals) does individual competence vary in significant ways. Variation between speakers and languages is minor noise, compared to what they have in common. (2) It is individ- ualist: language is an internal cognitive competence of individual agents; it is not essentially social. (3) The & Kim Sterelny Kim.Sterelny@anu.edu.au 1 School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 1 Though Hurford (2004b) points out that while recursive syntax is sufficient to make a system unbounded, it is not necessary: an iterative syntax combined with a finite stock of reusable elements can likewise be the basis of an unbounded system. 123 Biol Theory DOI 10.1007/s13752-016-0247-1