Origins of Human Communication
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262515207/origins-of-human-communication/ ↗
Tomasello's argument, built on decades of comparative work with great apes and human infants, is that human communication did not begin with language but with pointing and pantomime -- cooperative gestures grounded in shared intentionality.
Apes can request, but they cannot inform or share attitudes; humans do all three, and this capacity for shared intentionality is what made language possible, not the reverse.
The book is the central treatise on pre-linguistic communication and its evolutionary origins, delivered with the precision of someone who has spent years designing experiments to test exactly these claims.
It reframes the language question entirely: the puzzle is not grammar but cooperation.
Central argument
Tomasello argues that human communication originated not in language but in cooperative gestures — pointing and pantomime — made possible by a capacity unique to humans: shared intentionality, the ability to jointly attend to the world and understand others as intentional agents with perspectives to share. Crucially, he distinguishes three communicative motives — requesting, informing, and sharing attitudes — and demonstrates through comparative ape research that non-human primates are limited to requesting, lacking the infrastructure for the other two. Language, on this account, is downstream of cooperation, not its cause; the evolutionary puzzle to solve is not grammar but the prior emergence of joint intentionality.
Critique
Tomasello's framework rests heavily on experimental work with captive great apes and human infants in controlled settings, which raises questions about ecological validity — whether the absence of informing or attitude-sharing in apes reflects a genuine cognitive ceiling or the limits of the experimental paradigms designed to detect it. There is also a tension in treating 'shared intentionality' as a discrete threshold rather than a continuum: critics in comparative cognition have argued that the boundary between ape and human social cognition may be a matter of degree and context rather than kind, which would complicate the clean evolutionary story Tomasello tells.
Why it matters for product
The distinction between requesting, informing, and sharing attitudes maps directly onto the failure modes of product teams: most cross-functional communication defaults to requesting — tickets, briefs, asks — while the higher-order functions of informing peers of relevant context and genuinely sharing a frame of interpretation are systematically underdeveloped. A CPO designing team structures and rituals should ask whether the conditions for shared intentionality actually exist — common ground, joint attention to the same problem — before assuming that alignment is a communication volume problem solvable with more documentation or more meetings. Tomasello's work suggests that the precondition for effective product strategy is not a better roadmap format but a cooperative substrate that most organizations have not deliberately built.