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A way of thinking about thousands of languages spoken by humanity is visualizing them as branches of a tree, thus drawing The evolution of these languages over time. If we move forward in time, we will see the diversification of some languages and the death of others. If we invest the time needle we can see the branch or the common trunk that joins some languages with others.
For example, if we draw the history of Galician and Romanian, we will see in Latin the common origin of these languages spoken in remote areas of Europe. We can do the same exercise looking for the common trunk between Latin and the Swedish. For this we would have to go to prehistoric times, to a common trunk we call protoindoeuropeo And what would have been spoken Around 5,000 years.
However, this does not serve to unite all the languages spoken by humanity in the same tree. We do not know of a link that one languages native to the Americas, the languages of Asia and Oceania or the African languages with the protoindeuropean. We do not even need to leave Europe to find languages without known relationship: we can draw the common origin of the Finn and Hungarian, but we cannot unite these languages to the Indo -European trunk.
That leaves us with two possibilities. The first is that perhaps humans began to speak time after beginning the migratory movements that would lead us to adapt to life in various territories, which would imply that several native languages arose independently. That is, there are several independent trees.
The second indicates that this common trunk exists, but changes in languages and the absence of written testimony and time have erased all trace of this native language in the known, alive or dead languages. All languages have a common trunk, but perhaps we never find out their characteristics.
The question of the original language can be presented as the problem of the egg and the chicken: what happened first, the appearance of speech or geographical disintegration of the human species?
The interconnection between language and expansion of humanity is not mere curiosity because answering a question can help us Date more accurately Two of the key events in human evolution.
A recent study He analyzed the issue through a review of scientific literature published in the last 18 years. The work examined 15 genetic studies that through different methodologies They tried to answer the question of when the populations of H. sapiensThey began to break down and lose contact with each other.
The 15 works included three based on the chromosome information and, the patrilinerally inherited chromosome; Three focused on mitochondrial DNA, inherited matrilinerally; and the rest studied the set of human chromosomes.
The team made a meta -analysis, a quantitative study based on the results compiled in the compiled works, to obtain a new estimate of the last era in which in which All humanity shared spaces In the same region. The estimate indicated that this happened about 135,000 years ago.
The team concludes from this data that human language had to have an origin prior to this original diaspora. They start from the idea that, if language had not existed in this origin, we should have found any human society without language or, at least, with a radically different communicative form from what we know as speaks.
The details of the study were Published in an article In the magazineFrontiers in Psychology.
An evolution in several phases
But what exactly is speech? According to Explain the team itselfprevious studies had already pointed out that Other hominid speciesprevious to sapiens They had the ability to speak. The nuance is that this does not guarantee the existence of a language, however simple it is.
The issue for the team is not when humans, H. sapiens Or other species, they began to emit sounds, but when they began to develop the language “as we know it”, that is, “combining vocabulary and grammar in a system”, a system capable of generating an indefinite amount of expressions based on their own rules.
“Human language is quantitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, which work at the same time to create this Very complex system”, explained in a press release Shigeru Miyagawa, study co -author. “No other animal has a corresponding structure in its communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and communicate them with others.”
Miyagawa and his team also refer to the archaeological record to support their conclusions. As they explain, the archaeological record that has left us evidence of the existence of the type of complex thought that supports the language, evidence that date back 100,000 years ago in time. The team refers to this to artifacts that denote a “symbolic activity”, such as objects in objects or the decorative use of the ocher, a pigment.
We have known for a long time that H. sapiens It has not been the only human species capable of reaching these levels of abstraction. It is perhaps that is why The debate To what extent species like Neanderthals H. Neanderthalensis They could have developed speech or even language Be far from setting up.
In your articleThe team indicates that, although the “complex behaviors” such as burials and body decoration They can also be associated with these species, ours would have been the only one to have systematized them throughout the population.
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