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- The archaeological record reveals that about 40,000 years ago there was a flowering of art and other cultural artefacts at modern human sites, leading some archaeologists to suggest that a late genetic change in our lineage gave rise to language at this later time.
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How did language evolve from human ancestors?
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The first perspective that language evolved from the calls of human ancestors seems logical because both humans and animals make sounds or cries. One evolutionary reason to refute this is that, anatomically, the centre that controls calls in monkeys and other animals is located in a completely different part of the brain than in humans.
Oct 27, 2023 · The laryngeal descent theory (LDT) posits that language became possible only after anatomically modern Homo sapiens evolved around 200,000 years to 300,000 years ago. In H. sapiens, the larynx is lower in the throat than in our pre-H. sapiens ancestors or in modern non-human primates.
Jul 24, 2017 · If the capacity for language did evolve more than once, all traces of it seem to have been lost. This conclusion is buttressed by the FOXP2 evidence (all humans share the same derived gene) and by the fact that genetic data point to all modern humans descending from a common ancestor [19].
- Mark Pagel
- m.pagel@reading.ac.uk
- 2017
The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively traced back to the Paleolithic. However, archaeological and written records only extend the history of language into ancient times and the Neolithic. The distribution of languages has changed substantially over time.
Slowly at first, possibly beginning with simple sounds made by our ancestors Homo heidelbergenis, and then increasingly rapidly until there were thousands of languages spoken around the planet. But this has been fiercely debated and much is still not understood.
Feb 3, 2016 · To those of us who study human evolution, this incredible universality suggests that our species has had language right from when Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200,000 and 160,000...
Over thousands of years, humans have developed a wide variety of systems to assign specific meaning to sounds, forming words and systems of grammar to create languages. Many languages developed written forms using symbols to visually record their meaning.
