Posted on 04/15/2011 2:30:50 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The world's 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.
The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species.
Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and author of the study, found that the first migrating populations leaving Africa laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures by taking their single language with them—the mother of all mother tongues.
"It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of," Dr. Atkinson said.
About 50,000 years ago—the exact timeline is debated—there was a sudden and marked shift in how modern humans behaved. They began to create cave art and bone artifacts and developed far more sophisticated hunting tools. Many experts argue that this unusual spurt in creative activity was likely caused by a key innovation: complex language, which enabled abstract thought. The work done by Dr. Atkinson supports this notion.
His research is based on phonemes, distinct units of sound such as vowels, consonants and tones, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "the founder effect." That principle holds that when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group.
Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar founder effect could be discerned in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated on that continent and only then expanded elsewhere.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
maybe julius caesar was pronounced hoolio kaizer?
ah-reev-ah-dair-chee and sigh-a-nar-a
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How can you do that? Neither African nor American is a race. Is a Caucasian who moves from Africa to America an African American?
I was at a language camp in Norway and we went on a hiking trip. We came across an old guy that had a shack way up in the hills. The teacher (knew many of the Norwegian dialects) and the norwegian kids could only understand maybe 25% of what the old guy said.
The dialects will change from mountain valley to mountain valley but are still fairly similar. But this guy must have lived in the “Land that Time Forgot”.
It wouldn’t be Hebrew. That’s post-Babel. It would be the Adamic tongue, pre-Babel.
Yep, that emasculated pronunciation killed Latin for me as well.
I cannot picture Elmer Fudd conquering anything.
bump for later
Nice display of ignorance, there...
Lithic technology is one of my specialties in archaeology. Try to teach someone how to make a Clovis point by only pointing and grunting.
Can't be done...
baloney
When Europeans first came to Australia, they found hundreds of aborigine languaes, no two of which apparently resembled eachother any more than English and Japanese resemble eachother. Three is no way to square that with any theory of language evolution.
I hate to break it to ya: et cetera
Migration of the fittest and most ambitious...
Evidence on this thread to the contrary, the Gospel does not discriminate against the intelligent...
Linguistic group of one: talked to himself a lot and got tired of repeating himself... ‘-)
One of my names begins with "V". It is surprising how few linguistic groups can pronounce that sound...
I have. Fracture propagation vector analysis doesn't translate well into "Ugh!"... Try it; I have...
My Norwegian grandmother would call you Winnie. It’s odd because her “V” would come out as “W”. But her “W” would come out as “V”. I never heard anyone correct her so I just figured that they gave up trying. So it must have been more than “just switch them around”.
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