The Silent Movie Problem and the Evolution of Emotional Expressions
In the riveting 2013 movie All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a captain alone on his sailboat trying to stay afloat after it's been struck by another vessel. It was a physically demanding role for the seventy-seven-year-old, and his compelling work earned him the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor.
So far that sounds pretty unremarkable. A devastatingly handsome, Academy Award–nominated veteran actor wins yet another award for acting. Yawn.
But that movie wasn't like your typical movie. And Redford's acting requirements weren't quite, uhm, normal. Usually we imagine how difficult it is for actors to memorize all those lines. Well, in this case, Redford basically didn't have any lines. In fact, the entire movie contained only twenty words. Total. In the entire hour and forty-five minutes. Yet he still won an acting award!
That is weird.
A movie without words is indeed a rare novelty. When such modern movies are made, many are modeled after old-fashioned silent films (ones where we can see, but not hear, the characters talking), are about a deaf character (who is usually signing), or feature animals for their leads. All Is Lost doesn't fall into any of these categories.
As weird as this movie is, it's great for inspiring some thought experiments about how real life is even more weird. While a movie without dialogue is very rare—and usually carries an extremely limited market appeal—up until relatively recently humans lived without dialogue altogether.
We don't know exactly when we gained language skills. Estimates are in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of years ago. Prior to that, while humans were basically identical to today, biologically, they spoke nary a peep. We were ready for language, but in lingo limbo.
Sit back and let that sink in. Imagine going even one whole day among your family and friends with no one speaking. (It would be wonderful, yes?!) Of course, that would mean no texting or writing of any kind either. You still have to prepare a lasagna, though. So you need your spouse to run to the store to grab ground beef and tomato sauce. You need to get your son to chop the onions (because he's the one with cry-proof contact lenses) and find the pasta you accidentally left in the wrong place in the scary part of the basement. And you need to talk on the phone to your mom about grandma's recipe, which is what makes the lasagna worth doing. Going even one day without language feels almost unimaginable. So, visualize a week of that. Imagine one month. A whole year. An entire life!
And it's not just us humans who, before the advent of language, dealt with the deafening silence. Our prehuman ancestors and our hominid cousins were basically like us—similarly toiling through their lives . . . wordlessly. The more you think about this, the more difficult it might be to imagine.
The silent movies our ancestors endured are exceedingly counterintuitive to our modern times, so perhaps this thought experiment should have some fancy title that generations of great thinkers have considered.
As far as we know, there's no name for this stumper of a problem. So we'll christen it ourselves as the Languageless Hominid Problem: Language is central to what we now take to be human, so how did we possibly get by for millions of years as smart hominids without it?
Fine. We may have overstated how "empty" a dialogue-free life really was, to the extent that our intuition relied on imagining smart social animals robotically going about their daily activities. Such creatures—our recent ancestors included—were not dead-eyed robots but highly expressive beings, sending and receiving countless "messages" all day every day, their entire lives, generation after generation.
Even so, it's hard for most of us to imagine being able to get by in social communities only using non-verbal vocalizations, gestures, and anything else at our dialogueless communicative disposal. Language, with words and grammar and meaning and endless compositional power, seems utterly crucial to our daily interactions with other people.
Sure, our ancestors wouldn't have been trying to do some of what we do with language—like calling mom for grandma's lasagna recipe—but there's still all the other stuff they'd have to "talk" about. Surviving in nature without technology is hard enough. Imagine keeping the camp running with only gestures and whatnot!
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You just finished reading an excerpt from Tim Barber and my book, Expressly Human: Decoding the Language of Emotion. We go on to derive the complete signaling system used by social animals to negotiate without language. Starting from first principles—the challenge of reaching fair compromises without fighting—we show how a mathematical system of emotional expressions inevitably emerges.
We discover that emotional expressions operate in a four-dimensional space, with two primary components: responses that steer negotiations and acknowledgments that confirm receipt of others' signals. These dimensions correspond precisely to what social animals need to negotiate effectively.
Most surprisingly, we reveal how emotional expressions function like bets in poker, where social capital (reputation) is the currency. When you express confidence, you're betting reputation that you're right—creating natural pressure for honesty. This betting system undergirds why facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice evolved as they did.
The book demonstrates how this emotional expression system produces exactly eighty-one qualitatively distinct expressions—from anger and fear to appreciation and smugness—each with a precise negotiation-related meaning. We show how these map perfectly onto the valence-arousal space that emotion researchers have empirically discovered, providing independent validation of our theory.
Beyond explaining individual expressions, we illuminate how emotional expressions create the backbone of social networks. Social communities track reputation changes through gossip and social narratives—a distributed "blockchain" recording who was right and wrong. This mechanism allows communities to function without central authorities, gradually stumbling toward truth even as individuals avoid costly fights.
The implications extend far beyond evolutionary psychology. We reveal why social intelligence differs fundamentally from analytical intelligence, why emotional expressions are crucial for free speech, and even why modern social media platforms fail without proper emotional expression systems. Most importantly, we show that emotional expressions aren't primitive evolutionary leftovers—they're a sophisticated technology that made social life possible.
What began as a thought experiment about a nearly wordless Robert Redford film culminates in a complete theory of human emotional expression, finally answering the Languageless Hominid Problem and revealing the remarkable first language that preceded all others on Earth.