The genetic hardware that gave rise to humanity’s unique language capabilities first emerged at least 135,000 years ago, when all Homo sapiens still lived in one unbroken tribe. As this original group later split into a multitude of regional populations, the shared capacity for verbal and symbolic communication may have facilitated the development of modern human behavior and culture by around 100,000 years ago.
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Although our species has been on the planet for around 230,000 years – or perhaps even longer – the emergence of funerary practices, artwork, and other complex behaviors only became widespread at some point in the last 65,000 years or so. Anthropologists refer to this global cultural revolution as the “great leap forward”, yet there is currently no consensus on what triggered the process.
Seeking to unearth the roots of our cognitive and behavioral complexity, the authors of a new study note that “the 7,000 or so languages in the world today share striking similarities in the ways in which they are constructed phonologically, syntactically, and semantically.” This suggests that every single human population shares the same underlying capacity for language, which means that this ability must have evolved before the first Homo sapiens community started to divide.
“It follows that, if we can identify when the first division occurred, we can with reasonable certainty consider that date to define the lower boundary of when human language was present in the ancestral modern human population,” write the researchers. “Genomic studies of early H. sapiens population broadly agree that the first division from the original stem is represented today by the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa,” they add.
Analyzing data from 15 separate genetic studies, the authors determined that the initial division giving rise to the Khoisan occurred roughly 135,000 years ago. They therefore conclude that the development of language capabilities must precede this date, even if complex written and verbal communication systems had not yet been invented.
“At present, we cannot go back further to pinpoint the date by which language itself emerged,” they write. “What we can do is to look forward and see how, subsequent to 135 [thousand years ago], language may have had a direct hand in shaping modern human behaviors.”
For instance, the researchers note that “modern human behaviors such as body decoration and the production of ochre pieces with symbolic engravings appeared as normative and persistent behaviors around [100,000 years ago].” In other words, there appears to be a 35,000-year gap between the genetic origin of our linguistic capabilities and the widespread establishment of modern behavior.
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According to the study authors, this is a reasonable amount of time to allow for the development and spread of symbolic communication, thus suggesting that language may have been the key factor driving the “great leap forward”.
“We believe that the time lag implied between the lower boundary of when language was present […] and the emergence of normative modern human behaviors across the population suggests that language itself was the trigger that transformed nonlinguistic early H. sapiens (who nonetheless already possessed ‘language-ready’ brains acquired at the origin of the anatomically distinctive species) into the symbolically-mediated beings familiar today,” write the researchers.
The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
Source Link: Humans Have Had Language For At Least 135,000 Years
