The origin of human language: cognition and communication
We touched upon this question recently in "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/15/25), where we examined Daniel Everett's thesis as propounded in How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention. In that volume, Everett argues that language is learned / acquired / developed, not hard-wired in the human brain. He holds that our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus, had the biological and mental equipment for speech 1,500,000 years ago, 10 times earlier than the conventional wisdom that language originated with Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago, and that it was the result of a "language instinct".
Now we come back to the lower date with this new research as presented in:
Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Remo Nitschke, Mercedes Okumura, Ian Tattersall. Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025; 16 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900
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