How did human communication first escape the “here and now”? Displaced reference — the ability to refer to entities outside the immediate perceptual field — is a defining feature of human language (Hockett, 1960), and Bickerton (2009) rightly made it central to the language-origins problem. Yet the usual recruitment-to-food scenario does not explain why a genuinely offline representational system would be selected when pointing or leading could guide others to a distant resource. The Name-Leash hypothesis proposes a proper name — an individualized vocalization addressed to an absent infant — as a plausible candidate for the first displaced signal, rather than a food call. In cooperative-breeding contexts characteristic of early Homo (Hrdy, 2009; Burkart et al., 2025), mothers regularly transferred infants to allomothers and departed to forage. This created a recurrent affective pressure — separation anxiety directed at a specific, non-fungible child — that no perceptually grounded gesture could resolve. The proposed semiotic mechanism is the broken index. When the referent of an indexical signal disappears, the index loses its perceptual anchor. A proto-name repairs this break by preserving the singularity of pointing while acquiring the context-independence of a symbol. As a rigid designator (Kripke, 1980), the name carries no descriptive content requiring environmental verification; it can therefore function precisely when there is nothing to perceive. The paper further distinguishes three levels of decoupling within displacement: arousal-decoupling, here-decoupling, and now-decoupling. The first two are documented in several animal systems, especially cooperatively breeding callitrichids; the third — maintaining an individual representation across a temporal gap — is the hominin-specific achievement the proto-name mechanism is designed to explain. The hypothesis integrates evidence from cooperative breeding, upright walking and vocal-respiratory control, developmental phenomena such as solitary babbling and Fort/Da, comparative data on vocal individuation and mimesis, and neural evidence for cross-modal identity representation. It argues that the proto-name, born as affective self-regulation, became the minimal bridge from indexical signaling to displaced symbolic reference. This is version 3 of the preprint, expanding version 2 (Maslov, 2026, Zenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.19145762). The argument is the same; this version adds three components: a finer analysis of displacement (the three levels of decoupling, §2.2), a tighter semiotic core (the broken-index repair, §3, including Wray’s independent convergence), and a more developed comparative-neural anchor (§§8.3–8.4, 9.2, 9.4–9.5). A companion Supplementary Materials document develops the intellectual genealogy of the displacement problem, the pre-cooperative-breeding ecology, the modal philosophy of the sign, and the cultural elaborations of the proto-name mechanism, all of which are referenced from the main text.
Sergey Maslov (Mon,) studied this question.