And in any species that acquired it, it would encourage you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you.And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis.And we chose to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others.Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own.Well, language is the result.Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft.Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation -- for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities.And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be like a bird without wings.As I said at the beginning, language really is the voice of our genes.But, as we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages.Currently, there are about seven or eight thousand different languages spoken on Earth. And then another problem occurred.It seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from being stolen from outside.
