Editing Origin of language (section)

==== The gossip and grooming hypothesis ====
Gossip, according to [[Robin Dunbar]] in his book ''[[Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language]]'', language does for group-living humans what [[Social grooming|manual grooming]] does for other primates—it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: ''if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours''. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.<ref name="Dunbar1996">{{Cite book |last=Dunbar |first=R. I. M. |title=Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language |publisher=Faber & Faber |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-571-17396-9 |location=London}}</ref> In response to this problem, humans developed "a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming"—''vocal grooming''. To keep allies happy, one now needs only to "groom" them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language—initially in the form of "[[Gossip|gossip".]]<ref name="Dunbar1996" /> Dunbar's hypothesis seems to be supported by adaptations, in the structure of language, to the function of narration in general.<ref>{{Cite book |last=von Heiseler |first=Till Nikolaus |url=https://www.academia.edu/9648129 |title=Evolution of Language |publisher=World Scientific |year=2014 |editor-last=Cartmill |editor-first=R. L. C. |location=London |pages=114–121 |chapter=Language evolved for storytelling in a super-fast evolution|doi=10.1142/9789814603638_0013 |isbn=978-981-4603-62-1 }}</ref>

Critics of this theory point out that the efficiency of "vocal grooming"—the fact that words are so cheap—would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Power |first=C. |title=Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1998 |editor-last=Hurford |editor-first=J. R. |pages=111–129 |chapter=Old wives' tales: the gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals |editor-last2=Studdert-Kennedy |editor-first2=M. |editor-last3=Knight |editor-first3=C.}}</ref> A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming—the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds—to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.