The supporting idea is that people count one with the finger. The other supporting idea is that some languages still use similar words. For example, in Dinka — a Sudanese language — the word for one is tok. In Old English, tahe was the word for toe, which is similar to a finger. In Japanese, te is hand, which is also related to fingering. In an Eskimo language, the word for index finger the word is tik.
Examples are numerous, and they all pose one question: do they all come from the same origin? This is a transcript from the video series The Story of Human Language. Watch it now, on Wondrium. The language dates back to roughly , years ago.
However, all the linguistic evidence dates back to around years ago, when writing began. Consequently, the major history of language is discovered through guesses and written evidence that is much newer than the era that the linguists study.
Ruheln uses biological evolution to explain linguistic evolution. He argues that even though most scientists agree on the existence of a Proto-Mammal that later evolved to bats, cats, and humans. What changed in the species at that point? Did they just get smarter even if their brains didn't suddenly get larger?
Did they develop language all of a sudden? Did they become smarter because of the intellectual advantages that language affords such as the ability to maintain an oral history over generations?
If this is when they developed language, were they changing from no language to modern language, or perhaps from 'protolanguage' to modern language? And if the latter, when did 'protolanguage' emerge? Did our cousins the Neanderthals speak a protolanguage? At the moment, we don't know.
One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between , and , years ago. It is very tempting therefore to call FOXP2 a 'language gene', but nearly everyone regards this as oversimplified.
Are individuals afflicted with this mutation really language impaired or do they just have trouble speaking? On top of that, despite great advances in neuroscience, we currently know very little about how genes determine the growth and structure of brains or how the structure of the brain determines the ability to use language.
Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it. Christiansen, Morton H. Language Evolution.
New York: Oxford University Press. Hauser, Marc; Noam Chomsky; and W. Tecumseh Fitch. The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science Approaches to the Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackendoff, Ray. Part of the reason LDT caught on to begin with is that language evolution, as a field, lacks concrete data.
So the anatomical argument presented by LDT gave researchers something to latch on to. The researcher generally credited with developing laryngeal descent theory is Philip Lieberman , now a professor at Brown University. Yet other experts I spoke with told me that setting an upper bound on when speech, and therefore language, could have possibly evolved was exactly the effect that LDT had on anyone studying language evolution. That split happened about 5 million to 7 million years ago—certainly longer than , years, but a far cry from 27 million.
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