Los orígenes del lenguaje: nació para cooperar, no para engañar o mentir

to understand how humans communicate with one another using a language and how this competence might have arisen in evolution, we must first understand how humans communicate with one another using natural gestures. Indeed, my evolutionary hypothesis will be that the first uniquely human forms of communication were pointing and pantomiming… then acted as a kind of psychological platform on which the various systems of conventional linguistic communication (all 6,000 of them) could be built.

Pointing and pantomiming were thus the critical transition points in the evolution of human communication, already embodying most of the uniquely human forms of social cognition and motivation required for the later creation of conventional languages.

Lo que enriquece el contenido comunicativo de señalar en una dirección o hacia un objeto no es el “contexto” sino “our shared experience beforehand, and that was not the actual content of the communication but only its background. Nos apoyamos “heavily upon cognitive skills of what is sometimes called mindreading, or intention-reading” que, a su vez, presupone “some kind of joint attention or shared experience between us”

human communicative motives are so fundamentally cooperative that not only do we inform others of things helpfully, but one of the major ways we request things from others is simply to make our desire known in the expectation that they will volunteer help… if we are to understand the ultimate origins of human communication, both phylogenetically and ontogentically, we must look outside of communication itself and into human cooperation more generally.

This all began almost certainly in mutualistic activities in which an individual who helped her partner was simultaneously helping herself. But then there was a generalization to more altruistic situations in which individuals simply informed or shared things with others freely, possibly as a way to cultivate reciprocity and a reputation for cooperation within the cultural group. Only later still did humans begin to communicate in this new cooperative way outside of cooperative contexts for higher-up, noncooperative purposes—leading to the possibility of deception by lying.

Michael Tomasello Origins of Human Communication MIT Press, 2008"