Dr. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta's

World Literature Website

 

Origins of Language

• Ancestral roots of human language in animal sounds: grunts, barks, whines
  
  
• The language capacity is a product of natural selection, a successful adaptation taking place over the course of human evolution and providing its users with the survival advantages of communication and enhanced group cooperation (Lieberman); some claim it was the result of exaptation ("characteristics that arise in one context before being exploited in another," Tattersall) rather than adaptation
  
  
• 8-6 million years ago, humans split from chimpanzees; the vocal tract of chimpanzees is incapable of the articulation of the full range of sounds used by modern humans; e.g. chimp cannot raise tongue toward the roof of its mouth to articulate vowel sounds like "oo" and "ee" or cut off passage of air and make consonant sounds like "k" (Savage-Rumbaugh); but apes capable of learning sign language
  
  
• 3.5 million years ago, African australopithecines, apelike vocal tract, could not speak, communicated by gestures and grunts (Ehrlich)
  
  
• 3 million years ago, crude human proto-language: emergence of ability to pronounce more distinct sounds; early language as mixture of gestures and sounds
  
  
• 2 million years ago, Homo ergaster/archaic Homo erectus developed physical organs and mental capacity to produce a rough form of speech; beginning of the process of basicranial flexion which gradually led to longer pharynx and lower-positioned larynx necessary for the production of modern human speech sounds (Tattersall)
  
  
• 300,000 years ago, early Neanderthals still could not pronounce "ee" "oo" or "a" (as the vowel in "father")
  
  
• 100,000 years ago, first modern vocal tract appears in fossils of Homo sapiens
  
  
• 100,000-50,000 years ago, gradual brain lateralization and localization of certain language abilities in left hemisphere; beginnings of development of symbolic thought and of language as we know it
  
  
• Common origin of all human languages in a single language (Proto-World) first spoken in Africa around 70,000-60,000 years ago
  
  
• 40,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon culture in Europe: language-empowered modern humans gradually displaced Neanderthals
  
  
• 32,000 years ago, earliest cave paintings and sculpture, clear evidence of symbolic thought and sophisticated language use
  
  
• 28,000 years ago: Neanderthals extinct
  
  
• 10,000 years ago, end of the Ice Age, development of agriculture and animal herding
  
  
• 10,000-9,000 years ago, markings on clay tokens used in counting
  
  
• 6,000-5,500 years ago, counting marks combined with more complex pictographs incised on clay
  
  
• 5,300 years ago (3,300 BC), end of the Stone Age and Prehistory; beginnings of civilization and historical time; Sumerians develop writing in Mesopotamia
  
  
• 5,200 years ago (3,200 BC), Egyptians develop writing
  
  
• 3,500 years ago (1,500 BC), earliest alphabetic writing emerges in the Middle East (Canaan and Sinai), likely origin of the later Phoenician, Greek and Roman alphabets
  
  

References & Links:

• Ian Tattersal, "How We Came to be Human," Scientific American, December 2001, pp. 56-63.
• Ian Tattersal, The Monkey in the Mirror (2002)
• Philip Lieberman (Brown University), Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution (1998)
• Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University), Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (2000)
• Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (Georgia State University)

 

 

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Last updated: 01/12/2010