Read Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man for Free Online Page A

the conclusion I would like the reader to draw is that nature-harnessing—not instinct, and not a general-purpose brain—is the general mechanism by which we came to have these powers.

 
    Chapter 2
     
    Speech Events
     
    Grasshopper
    I n M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Village , a young woman, Ivy, sets off on a journey into an unknown forest. She has persuaded the elders of her tribe to let her find other people on the far side of the forest, get medicine, and return to save the life of her sick lover. She has no knowledge of anything beyond the several acres of her village, except that beyond their meadow and inside the forest are chilling, otherworldly beasts that occasionally invade the village and carve up one of the pets.
    As if this quest were not harrowing enough, there’s an important fact I left out: she is blind. Now, the village leaders know the truth about what’s beyond their meadow—no beasts (but the costumed elders themselves), just woods, and then modern civilization, from which they’ve sheltered their children. That’s why they allow her to go into the forest. But no one of Ivy’s generation knows this. And neither do we, the moviegoers. We’re terrified for her. As it turns out, terrifying things do happen to her in that forest, because a monster (really a man from the village in a monster costume) secretly follows her, and eventually attacks her.
    The movie would be considerably less dramatic if our female heroine were deaf, rather than blind. Instead of a woman waving her arms and tramping about through the thorny tangles, we’d be watching a woman walking normally through the forest, keeping to deer trails. In fact, many of us regularly do just this, wearing headphones and blasting music as we deafly, yet deftly, jog through our local park. This would not quite elicit the thrill Shyamalan had in mind. A deaf person on a forest quest does not make a good movie. Being deaf just doesn’t seem like much of a big deal compared to blindness. If not for the inability to hear speech, we might hardly miss our auditory systems if they fell out through our ears.
    Then again, there’s another twist to the story that may change one’s feeling about audition: our young blind heroine defeats her attacker. She kills him, in fact. She may look out of sorts crashing into trees, but her hearing makes it impossible for her attacker to sneak up on her. Especially in the forest. Had she been deaf, not blind, her attacker could have whistled “Dixie”with an accordion accompaniment while following her through the woods and still taken her completely by surprise.
    If deaf-maiden-alone-in-the-forest is not spine-tingling to movie audiences, it is only because we tend not to appreciate all that our ears do for us beyond language. Providing a sneakproof alert system is just one of the many powers of audition.
    The greatest respect for our ears is found among blind kung fu masters. Every “Grasshopper” learns from his old blind master that by attending to and dissecting the ambient sounds around oneself, it is possible to sense how many attackers surround one, their locations, stances, weapons, intent, confidence level, and which one is the enemy mastermind. I once saw, in an old movie, one of these scrawny geezers defeat six men using only a baseball bat wielded upside down. But you don’t have to be a fictional blind kung fu master to have a mastery of audition and know how to sense the world with it. We all do; we just don’t get all “Grasshopper” about it. Our brains have a mastery of it even if we’ve never thought about it.
    In fact, when I first began pondering whether speech might sound like natural events, I had great difficulty thinking of any important natural-event sounds. I was initially dumbfounded: what is so useful about having ears that nearly all vertebrates have them? It seemed to me that I primarily use my ears for listening to speech, and that obviously cannot explain why all those