What do we know about the origin of language? The short answer is nothing? Which is funny, because when I went to University I thought that the origin of language had already been explained and should have been easy peasy. After all, the much more diffucult task of deriving man from monkey proved a non-brainer.
But there is a difference. There are no fossils of nouns and verbs. So discovering the past of our language must be based on guesswork.
A recent discussion on Melvyn Bragg’s „In our time” summarises recent findings (conjectures) about the language of our ancestors.
It seems that even Neanderthals had language or its rudiments. First, in order to kill a massive, dangerous animal like a mammoth you needed an organised group of 20, 30 possibly 40 people and this required relatively sophisticated communication skills.
Secondly there is this business of the FOXP2 gene, which has been called the language gene, but the story is more controversial. Simon Conway Morris,
Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge says „What we know is that when FOXP2 mutates or mulfunctions, it interferes with language production in modern people. It’s been called the language gene, but actually it does many other things. It certainly is not going to be the only component of language. The fact that they’ve got it and we’ve got it means that it has been there in our common ancestor 500 thousand years ago. So I think we have to grant them (Neanderthals) basic language abilities.”
Thirdly, „people have tried to reconstruct the Neanderthals’ vocal tracts, to see what sounds they could make, but even on the worst case scenario they’ve got 25 or 30 percent of the range of sounds we can make and for modern humans this is completely adequte to make complex communication. But I doubt if they had the complexity of language we are using now” .
Melvyn Bragg: „But we did not have back then the complexity of language we are using now”.
Simon Conway Morris: „Well, there is evidence from Africa that modern humans were communicating in more complex way probably 100 thousand years ago. We start to see the beginning of complexity there, which we do not find at that time in Neandertals. They do get more complex at the end of their time, but at that time there is a gap beginning to open up – in my view - of complexity of communication and symbolism”.
Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Muse hints that before the Neandertals were completely gone, they might have started to imitate the way of life of modern humans they were in contact with (both races rubbed shoulders for a while). Could they have started to imitate their language?
We have a collection of phantasy stories in Polish. Jakub Wędrowycz, Poland’s answer to Doctor Who fights not the Daleks, but a tribe of Neanderthals, who survived in hiding on the Polish-Ukrainian borderland and even learned Polish (or possibly cyrilic). So even this might be possible. Just!
(stories about Jakub Wendrowycz are written by Andrzej Pilipiuk. The particular story about the Neanderthals is called „The Russian Rulette”. I do not know if an English translation exists)
