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Scientists Just Dated The First Human Language

One of the biggest mysteries in all of human history is the question of when our ancestors first began to truly speak to one another, and a new study has put the most precise answer yet on the table. Researchers led by linguist Shigeru Miyagawa at MIT, alongside colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History, analyzed 15 genetic studies spanning the past 18 years to trace the earliest known branching of human populations. Their logic is elegantly simple: since every group of people that ever split off and spread across the globe has developed language, and all languages share fundamental similarities, language must have already existed before those first splits happened. The genetic evidence points to human populations first dividing around 135,000 years ago, which means the cognitive capacity for language was almost certainly present by that point, or earlier.

The researchers also propose that language likely did not start as a way to talk to others at all. Instead, they believe it may have begun as a private internal thinking system, a way for the mind to organize and process complex ideas, before gradually becoming the social tool we know today. Around 100,000 years ago, the archaeological record shows early humans beginning to use symbols in meaningful ways, making deliberate markings on objects and producing ocher, a decorative red pigment, which are exactly the kinds of behaviors that language makes possible. The team argues that language was not just a byproduct of human intelligence but the very spark that ignited the great leap forward in human creativity, social complexity and innovation. What makes human language unique, they emphasize, is not simply the ability to make sounds, but the combination of words and structure that together create an endlessly generative system no other animal on Earth has come close to matching.

Source: https://www.earth.com/news/when-humans-created-the-first-language-and-communication-skills/

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