Quentin Atkinson | Single, Original Language Came From Africa
GlobeTracker| Scientists believe that the world’s about 6,000 modern languages may all be related to a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans who lived 50,000-70,000 years ago.
New Zealand researcher and evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson believes that the first migrating populations out of Africa took a single language with them. The precise timeline is under debate, but about 50,000 years ago, humans expressed distinct behavior shifts. They created cave art and significantly more complex tools.
Many experts attribute this evolution to the growth of language, and Dr. Atkinson agrees. Writes WSJ:
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.
In an analysis of 504 world languages, Dr. Atkinson found a strong connection between dialects with the most phonemes being spoken in Africa and nearby migration countries. Those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific.
Until now, language researchers say it has been impossible to trace language back much further than 8,000-10,000 years.
But the latest Science paper “and our own observations suggest that it is possible to detect an arrow of time” underlying proto-human languages spoken more than 8,000 years ago, said Murray Gell-Mann of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, who read the Science paper and supports it. The “arrow of time” is based on the notion that it is possible to use data from modern languages to trace their origins back 10,000 years or even further.
Share Article Fri, April 15, 2011 1 Comment in Nature, Women's Lives, World Events tagged Africa, Quentin Atkinson, evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, humans, language
Reader Comments (1)
This is very interesting. I would like to know more. But not only form the point of phonemes, but also from the point of grammar. Is the grammer of African languages more complex than of the Indoeuropean languges, e.g. Sanskrit.