by New research has revealed the likely time in prehistory when humans first began to speak.
Analysis by British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that early humans first developed a basic language around 1.6 million years ago – somewhere in eastern or southern Africa.
“There was no doubt that the development of human speech was the key that made possible much of the subsequent physical and cultural evolution of man. That is why it is so important to date the development of the earliest forms of language,” said Dr Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading.
Until recently, most human evolution experts thought that humans only started speaking around 200,000 years ago. Professor Mithen’s new research, published this month, suggests that basic human language is at least eight times older. His analysis is based on a detailed study of the available archaeological, paleoanatomical, genetic, neurological and linguistic evidence.
Taken together, all the evidence suggests that the birth of language occurred as part of a series of human evolution and other developments between two and 1.5 million years ago.
Significantly, human brain size increased particularly rapidly from 2 million BC, especially after 1.5 million BC. Associated with that increase in brain size was a reorganization of the brain’s internal structure – including the first appearance of the frontal lobe area, which was specifically related to language production and language comprehension. Known by scientists as Broca’s area, it appears to have arisen from earlier structures that were responsible for humanity’s early ability to communicate with hand and hand gestures.
New scientific research suggests that the appearance of Broca’s area was also linked to improvements in working memory – a critical factor in sentence creation. But other evolutionary developments were also crucial to the birth of basic language. The process of changing the shape and position of the vocal tract certainly began, around 1.8 million years ago, with a more advanced form of duplicating, along with changes in the shape of the human skull, to change the shape and position of the vocal tract.
Another key piece of evidence comes from the archaeological record which shows around 1.6 million BC. as the approximate date when people began to speak. Compared to many other animals, humans were not particularly strong. To survive and thrive, they had to compensate for that relative physical weakness.
In evolutionary terms, language was almost certainly part of that compensatory strategy of physical strength. To hunt large animals (or, during scavenging, to defeat physically strong animal rivals), early humans needed better group planning and coordination abilities – the development of language would have been crucial to facilitate this . Significantly, in terms of date, human hunting began around two million years ago – but seems to have accelerated significantly around 1.5 million years ago. Around 1.6 million BC also saw the birth and intergenerational cultural transmission of much more sophisticated stone tool technology. That long-term transfer of complex knowledge and skills from generation to generation also strongly suggests the existence of speech.
In addition, language communication was probably crucial to allow people to live in different ecological and climatic zones – it is probably not a coincidence that people were able to greatly accelerate their colonization of the world around 1.4 million years ago, . i. shortly after the probable date of. the birth of language. Language has enabled people to do three main forward-looking things – to conceive and plan future actions and to pass on knowledge.
“That’s how language changed the human story so much,” said Professor Mithen. His new research, set out in a new book, The Language Puzzle, published this month, suggests that earlier humans around 1.6 million years ago had a much more limited ability to communicate – probably only a few dozen different sounds and hand gestures that could only be used in specific contexts and could not, therefore, be used. for forward planning. For planning, basic grammar and individual words were needed.
Professor Mithen’s research also suggests that there appears to be some continuity between very early human languages and modern languages. He believes that certain aspects of that first linguistic development 1.6 million years ago can still be felt in modern languages today. He is suggesting that words – which describe what they stand for – through their sounds or length – were among the first words spoken by early humans.
Indeed, future research may be able to tentatively reconstruct the probable organization and structure of these first languages. Although language seems to have been born around 1.6 million years ago, that birth represented the beginning of language development, not its peak.
For hundreds of thousands of years, language only gradually became more complex, eventually advancing in sophistication after the emergence of anatomically modern humans 150,000 years ago.
