Sprechen sie Neanderthal?

 Is language very, very old or just really old? By “just really old” I mean 80 to 100 thousand years. Our own line of Homo sapiens was until recently dated at about 200 thousand years and now seems  to be 300 thousand years old. The thought that for 2/3s of its history, even Homo sapiens was without language is startling, since so much of our species seems built for language. Our vocal system includes features like a wind pipe that is exposed to the mouth, increasing the risk of food going down the air pipe to the lungs by mistake. We got rid of the air sacs in our chests (still p resent in other apes) that reduces our ability to yell impressively, while improving our ability to speak clearly. A whole host of muscles and timing permit us to articulate a wider range of sounds more precisely and fluently. So, if language is only 100 thousand years old, these features must have evolved for reasons other than language. No one has much of an idea what those reasons might be.Or language might be very, very old, that is to say 1.8 to 1.5 million years old. That would make it anywhere from 15 to 22.5 times older than common estimates. This figure would provide the time necessary to evolve all the physical traits we enjoy that support language, but it raises the question of what took us so long to conquer the world. If the  Homo erectus of 1 million years ago already had half a million years of speech behind it, why was the culture still so crude and the tool box so simpl...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs