language as gossip

The impetus for language is commonly attributed to strategizing about hunting. I’d like to put forth an alternative hypothesis which is that language emerged as a way of expressing empathic ideas about others. That we evolved via sexual selection to get very good at gossiping. The evidence for language being a vehicle for sharing empathy for others may be the anthropomorphising of just about all aspects of the external world. Shared empathy for a third (SEFAT) became a successful way of knowing (confirmed by anticipated actions of others coming to pass). There was no other subject that we would have been able to talk about so deeply and with such success. The space of discourse revealed by SEFAT was far more expressive, able to describe complex interactions between multiple people, than any other mode of communication. Once we started to apply this mode to other animals and groups of similar hominids, those complexities became metaphorical structures that we could use to describe many situations in far greater detail. Thus SEFAT would become our most efficient way of sharing complex ideas, and the resulting metaphorical application of it became the dominant mode by which we could acquire and transmit knowledge. The result was that we anthroporphized everything from animals to forces of nature and the creation of the universe. The idea that god was humanlike was an inevitable result of casting that form onto all that we talked about.