Friday, April 29, 2011

Mother of All Tongues

The Western Confucian reports:
"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" — Human Languages Originate from Africa, Too. The hypothesis, which provides further evidence for a Proto-Human language, in a nutshell:
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.
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