Origins of language. The most recent plausible dates are about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago (a transitional time in human culture). Older plausible dates have been suggested as far back as 200,000 to 300,000 years ago (around the emergence of Homo sapiens), or even 600,000 to 800,000 years ago (assuming a common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis had language). Our position is that language was probably used about 300,000 years ago, although it may have lacked modern sophistication until 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, and may have existed in some intermediate state somewhere between “language” and “sophisticated communication” as far back as 2.6 million years ago when the Homo tribe split off from Australopithecine lines and Oldowan stone tools appear in the fossil record.

Questions of when human language reached a level of sophistication characteristic of contemporary languages are complicated by a few factors. First, there is the problem of defining language and measuring the sophistication of language. Second, there is the problem that prior to the invention of writing, language left no direct material evidence, and we can only indirectly infer the existence of language. Third, there is the problem that language is a phenomena of consciousness and mind, and these aspects of human experience are complex with many facets, and it is possible that some elements of thought and language developed long before other elements did, so that there was a gradual accumulation of various aspects of thought and language, making it difficult to distinguish at what point a sufficient quantity of the elements of language and consciousness existed in order to justify claiming that “language” had arrived on the scene.

Here are some of the milestones that might be useful in considering the origin of language.

It is clear that there was a sort of burst of cultural innovation and abstract symbolic cultural accomplishments between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. In those years humans began burying people with beads and valuable objects, as in the burials from 34,000 years ago at Sunghir in Russia. The Venus of Hohle Fels (a small statue of a female figure) is one of the earliest figurative art objects, and it dates to about 40,000 years ago, and that is also about the same age as the oldest petroglyphs (although there are reasonable claims that some petroglyphs may date back as far as 60,000 years ago); Since there is a marked increase in the creation of sophisticated abstract and figurative artifacts about 40,000 years ago, some people suggest that human language dates to around this time.

However, there are earlier (but less sophisticated) examples of abstract art or symbolism dating back to 73,000-100,000 years ago. The Blombos Cave in South Africa has shell beads and ochre lines drawn on stone, as well as pieces of ocher with abstract patterns engraved upon them, and decorated ostrich egg shell fragments. These Blombos Cave artifacts date from 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, and match in age some traps used to catch bush pigs and blue duikers found in Sibudu cave. There are also pierced shells presumably used for jewelry that date back about 100,000 years found at Es-Skhul on Mount Carmel in Israel. This suggests that abstract thought was being expressed 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, and thus, language may date back that far. This also matches the fact that modern humans moved out of Africa in this time period 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. Since all humans left behind in Africa as well as all the humans who are descended from those who moved out of Africa have equivalent human language abilities, it makes sense that human language ought to have evolved by these dates if not earlier.

And language could go back much earlier. Homo sapiens enter the fossil record about 300,000 years ago with a group of five archaic Homo sapiens leaving remains in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. A Homo sapien skull from Florisbad, South Africa has been dated to 260,000 years ago. Two sites in Ethiopia offer Homo sapien remains from around 200,000 years ago. These are archaic Homo sapiens, not the modern Homo sapien sapien sub-species to which all modern humans belong. And yet, if the characteristic large brains and other features that distinguish our species correlate to language use, then language could date back to 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Around 2002 some DNA research suggested that a mutation in the FOXP2 gene might have made a big difference in human language abilities, and subsequently, around 200,000 years ago, the mutation may have swept through the hominin genome. In 2018 the evidence for that theory of gene sweeping vanished, although FOXP2 may still have played an important role in improving human language ability, and there may have been a sweep of some other language-ability mutation occurring much earlier in hominin evolution.

Much earlier? In addition to evidence that FoxP2 gene mutations and other associated genetic markers that correspond to language ability going back earlier than 200,000 years in the fossil record, there is also evidence that a lowered or “descended” larynx enabled language by making complex vocalizations possible, and the lowered human supralaryngeal vocal tract (the SVT) must have provided some evolutionary benefit to offset the increased risk of choking. The descended larynx appears on Homo sapiens 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, so that puts language back to that period. Robin Dunbar (in the late 1990s) suggested that language emerged to make our social bonding through grooming and gossip more efficient, and thus might have evolved in hominin species gradually over hundreds of thousands of years, offering social powers that gave us evolutionary advantages outweighing the cost of increased choking risks. Dediu and Levinson (in 2013) suggested that systematic culture-supporting communication systems may date back to 2.5 million years ago, with modern language coming into place by 600,000 to 800,000 years ago, although Berwick, Hauser, and Tattersall dismissed those arguments and insisted that the better evidence was for modern language appearing within the past 100,000 years. Yet, cultural artifacts show that hominins had symbolic and abstract thought long before modern humans arrived on the scene. For example, Homo naledi bodies were hidden deep in a cave between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago, and the Homo naledi species, which had brains about a third the size of modern human brains, may date back to 2 million years ago.

Using a broader definition of language, it is worth noting that recent studies of animal communication and cross-species communication demonstrate that many aspects of language are not unique to humans. Dolphins and green-rumped parrotlets have names (“signature contact calls”); in the case of the parrotlets, names their parents give them, which they keep for life, as documented by Karl Berg. Sophisticated communication with abstract thought is evident widely across the animal kingdom. Prairie dogs can describe the size, shape, color, and speed of predators, and string together information in their calls to describe novel situations they haven’t encountered before, as documented by Con Slobodchikoff. Crows can evidently warn other crows about the description of humans who pose threats. Octopus and grouper can coordinate their hunting in a corral reef. Honeyguide birds and humans communicate to cooperate in finding bee nests. Fork-tailed drongo birds warn meerkats of approaching dangers, and sometimes deceive meerkats by mimicking meerkat calls representing predators who aren’t actually present (thus scaring the meerkats away so that the drongo birds can steal meerkat food). There are famous cases of animals that may have had language abilities such as Alex the African Grey Parrot, or Kanzi, the bonobo, or Koko the gorilla; Alex and Koko even asked questions. The fact that these sophisticated communication abilities exist in various mammals and birds, and possibly even some cephalopoda and fish, present us with a possibility that rather sophisticated pre-linguistic communication abilities long pre-date the evolution of humans. It may be that the roots of language and the mental abilities that allow it go back many millions of years.

1. Barbara King’s essay about when human speech evolved (from NPR)
2. Ray Jackendoff’s rather old (2006) article at the Linguistic Society of America about the beginnings of language asks the questions and points out the difficulties in answering the questions related to the origins of modern human language. Also available as a pdf.
3. ScienceNews article by Tina Hesman Saey about the FOXP2 gene not causing a language ability breakthrough resulting in an evolutionary sweep in the human gene population, but the article quotes Kirk Lohmueller as suggesting that if there was a genetic sweep of some gene facilitating speech and language, it could have occurred “so long ago that the signal is too weak to pick up now.”
4. Marc Ettlinger asks about the complexity of Neaderthal speech.
5. Article by Asif Ghazanfar and Drew Rendall about the evolution of human vocal production from Cell [pdf].
6. An article by Nishimura, Mikami, Suzuki, and Matsuzawa about the descent of the larynx in humans and chimpanzee infants, which may have descended due to evolutionary pressures that did not include the development of language.
7. Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson make the case for language dating back to about 500,000 years ago (2013) in Frontiers in Psychology.
8. Much of the debate about early language development centers on the question of whether Homo erectus and its contemporary Homo species needed language in order to pass on cultural knowledge about tool-making. The National History Museum in London has a good page about Homo erectus.
9. Rebuttal of Dediu & Levinson (2013) by Berwick, Hauser, and Tattersall, suggesting language is not older than 100,000 years. From Frontiers in Psychology.
10. Trinkaus and Buzhilova describe the Sunghir burials.
11. Lea Suruge’s article in Sapiens about the Sunghir burials.
12. Erin Blakemore’s article about a stone flake marked with ochre found in Blombos Cave and dated to 73,000 years ago.
13. Ruth Schuster’s article about the 73,000 year-old ochre hashtag from Blombos Cave.
14. John Hamilton’s 2006 report on talking bonobos from NPR.
15. Ferris Jabr’s detailed 2017 article from the New York Times about Slobodchikoff’s research on prairie dog communication.
16. LiveScience article by Stephanie Pappas about research by John Marzluff on crow communication.
17. Virginia Morell’s article in National Geographic about fork-tailed drongos, who have mastered the “language” of meerkats.
18. Fiona MacDonald’s article in Nature about communication between the Yao people of Mozambique and honeyguide birds.

This work by Eric & Chun-Chih Hadley-Ives is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.