But this evidence derives mainly from European sites and so struggles to explain how the newly evolved language capacity found its way into the rest of humanity who had dispersed from Africa to other parts of the globe by around 70,000 years ago.Īncient DNA reveals us to be over 99% identical in the sequences of our protein coding genes to our sister species the Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis). The archaeological record reveals that about 40,000 years ago there was a flowering of art and other cultural artefacts at modern human sites, leading some archaeologists to suggest that a late genetic change in our lineage gave rise to language at this later time. This conclusion is backed up by evidence of abstract and symbolic behaviour in these early modern humans, taking the form of engravings on red-ochre. Because all human groups have language, language itself, or at least the capacity for it, is probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years old. No one knows for sure when language evolved, but fossil and genetic data suggest that humanity can probably trace its ancestry back to populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (people who would have looked like you and me) who lived around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago in eastern or perhaps southern Africa. Hunting and social group communications can be explained as learned coordinating signals without ‘speakers’ knowing why they are acting as they are. Alarm calls such as observed in the vervet monkeys often evolve by kin-selection to protect one’s relatives, or even selfishly to distract predators away from the caller.
The trained chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky’s longest recorded ‘utterance’, when translated from sign language, was ‘give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you’. Most ape sign language, for example, is concerned with requests for food. Instead non-human animal communication is principally limited to repetitive instrumental acts directed towards a specific end, lacking any formal grammatical structure, and often explainable in terms of hard-wired evolved behaviours or simple associative learning. These forms of animal communication are symbolic in the sense of using a sound to stand in for an object or action, but there is no evidence for compositionality, or that they are truly generative and creative forms of communication in which speakers and listeners exchange information. Some dolphin species seem to have a variety of repetitive sound motifs (clicks) associated with hunting or social grouping. A number of parrot species can mimic human sounds, and some Great Apes have been taught to make sign language gestures with their hands.
Among primates, vervet monkeys ( Chlorocebus pygerythrus) produce three distinct alarm calls in response to the presence of snakes, leopards and eagles.
Animal ‘language’ is nothing like human language.
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