Why Do Humans Speak?
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2025
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a radical new story about the birth of our species, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman argues that it was not hunting, fighting, or tool-making that forced early humans to speak, but the inescapable need to care for our children.
Beekman reveals the "happy accidents" hidden in our molecular biology—DNA, chromosomes, and proteins—that led to one of the most fateful events in the history of life on Earth: our giving birth to babies earlier in their development than our hominid cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Faced with highly dependent infants requiring years of nurturing and protection, early human communities needed to cooperate and coordinate, and it was this unprecedented need for communication that triggered the creation of human language—and changed everything.
Madeleine Beekman is professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her new book is The Origin of Language.
Transcript
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| 1:10.3 | You're listening to The Michael Sherman Show. |
| 1:20.2 | All right, so your book, The Origin of Language, I love this subject because I love origin questions, the origin |
| 1:28.1 | of the universe, the origins of life, the origins of complex life, the origins of humanity, |
| 1:34.9 | the origins of language, morality. That's pretty much it. Those are the big questions that I |
| 1:39.3 | think scientists should tackle. So, you know, good on you for taking this on. Give us a little |
| 1:43.2 | bit of background. What's your story? How did you get into this? Well, it's interesting. So I'm an experimental |
| 1:49.2 | biologist, and, well, as you mentioned, I got a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in |
| 1:55.8 | Berlin, which is just a think tank, basically. You can't do any experimental work. |
| 2:02.5 | So I decided I was going to write a book, |
| 2:05.0 | and I had this very ambitious project in mind, |
| 2:09.0 | and the book was going to be called the... |
| 2:11.6 | Oh, what was it called? |
... |
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