How old is human spoken language

Some animals, including birds and even elephants, can mimic human voice sounds by using an entirely different anatomy. These amazing mimics illustrate how cautious scientists must be in assigning sounds or speech to specific places in the evolutionary journey of human languages. The brain must also be capable of controlling the production and the hearing of human speech sounds.

Where, when, and in which human ancestor species a language-ready brain developed is a complicated and fascinating field for further research. By studying the way our primate relatives like chimpanzees use their hands naturally, and can learn human signs, some scientists suspect that language developed first through gestures and was later made much more efficient through speech. Other researchers are searching backward in time for evidence of a cognitive leap forward which produced complex thought and, in turn, speech language abilities able to express those thoughts to others— perhaps with speech and language co-evolving at the same time.

For example, some brain studies show that language uses similar parts of the brain as toolmaking, and suggest that by the time the earliest advanced stone tools emerged 2 million years ago , their makers might have had the ability to talk to each other.

Some kind of cognitive advance in human prehistory could have launched both skills. The physics of the object define what that object can do in the world. How long did it take for our ancestors to find the voices they were equipped with all along?

Read: A rare universal pattern in human languages. Those speech abilities could include distinct vowels and consonants, syllables, or even syntax—all of which, according to LDT, should be impossible for any animal without a human vocal tract. For proponents of LDT, it was the reshaping of the human throat.

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.

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