Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Complex language is something that sets humans apart from other animals. But when did this unique capacity for intricate communication emerge?
Linguists have postulated that there may be an ancient language that sits at the root of all modern languages. This theory was strengthened in the 19th and 20th centuries with the discovery of links between the Indo-European language groups, leading to the suggestion of an ancient Proto-Indo-European language which would have been spoken up to 7,000 years ago.
But could this be pushed back further to find a common root of even more disparate languages?
As the great science communicator and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said in his 1989 essay, “Grimm’s Greatest Tale:”
“Most scholars balk at the very thought of direct evidence for connections among these basic “linguistic phyla.” The peoples were once united, of course, but the division and spread occurred so long ago (or so the usual argument goes) that no traces of linguistic similarity should be left according to standard views about rates of change in such volatile aspects of human culture.”
A new analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology by a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) uses a different approach to try and find the origin of human language: genomic data.
Modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged about 230,000 years ago in Africa. The new research begins with the assumption that there is a common language or language group to which all modern languages can be traced.
“The logic is very simple,” says co-author Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguist at MIT. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.”
Miyagawa’s team mapped out human geographic divergence using data from 15 genetic studies published in the last 18 years.
“I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before,” Miyagawa says.
H. sapiens then diverged geographically, taking this linguistic capability with them.
Another school of thought is that the origin of language dates back millions of years to primate ancestors of modern humans. But Miyagawa says the question is not when primates could utter certain sounds, but when humans developed the cognitive ability to develop a vocabulary and grammar system for language as we know it.
“Human language is qualitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, working together to create this very complex system,” Miyagawa says. “No other animal has a parallel structure in their communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and to communicate them to others.”
The capacity for language and its use are also not the same thing. So, if Miyagawa’s team suggests that humans were able to communicate as far back as 135,000 years ago, when did they actually begin using language?
Archaeological evidence shows the widespread appearance of symbolic activity about 100,000 years ago.
“Language was the trigger for modern human behaviour,” Miyagawa says. “Somehow it stimulated human thinking and helped create these kinds of behaviours. If we are right, people were learning from each other [due to language] and encouraging innovations of the types we saw 100,000 years ago.”
“Our approach is very empirically based, grounded in the latest genetic understanding of early homo sapiens,” Miyagawa says. “I think we are on a good research arc, and I hope this will encourage people to look more at human language and evolution.”
Those who have been interested in these questions, such as Stephen Jay Gould, were drawn to its profound implications for humanity.
Gould wrote in his 1989 essay: “If you know when a group split off and where it spread, you have the basic outline (in most cases) of its relationships with others. The primary signature of time and history is not effaced, or even strongly overlain in most cases, by immediate adaptation to prevailing circumstances or by recent episodes of conquest and amalgamation. We remain the children of our past – and we might even be able to pool our differences and to extract from inferred pathways of change a blurred portrait of our ultimate parents.”
