Language Grew as a Stone-Age Aid to Gossip

Language evolved so women could gossip, not so men could talk while hunting as had long been thought, according to a theory posited by an anthropologist.

“This would explain our fascination for social gossip in the newspapers and why gossip about relationships accounts for an overwhelming proportion of human conversations,” said Robin Dunbar, professor of biological anthropology at University College London.

He believes humans need to bond with other humans, and that language is much more efficient than fur grooming, which consumes much of the waking hours of chimps and baboons.

Dunbar said researchers have no way of knowing what tribal women talked about. But he figured that if people today spend so much time gossiping, it’s likely our ancestors did, too.

His theory was described in a recent issue of New Scientist, a British weekly.

“I think it’s a lovely hypothesis that makes a great deal of sense,” said Phyllis Lee, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge University.

But Barry Keverne, a Cambridge University investigator who has studied how animals bond, said Dunbar’s theory “sounds highly speculative.”

Language has many functions, said Keverne, including passing along vital information from one generation to the next and educating people. “That certainly is not gossip.”

For years, scientists assumed that language developed so men could talk while hunting. But Dunbar does not think they chatted much and that hunting developed long before talking.

In an informal study of conversations in a university coffee room, Dunbar found that people devoted about a third of their time to talking about people who weren’t there--in other words, gossiping.