Language May Have Evolved Earlier Than Supposed

Science News reports on research suggesting that humans' language ability may have developed earlier than we thought. Scientists used CT scanning of H. heidelbergensis skulls, more than 530,000 years old, to reconstruct the structure of the ear canal of this Neanderthal ancestor. They found evidence that the ears of these early hominids would have had a sensitivity peak in the same 2-4 KHz range that the ears of modern humans do — the range in which most information is carried in language. Sensory systems are neurologically expensive, and it's unlikely that the body would invest the resources in maintaining such a system if it didn't serve a purpose. Quoting: "It may be time to rethink the stereotype of grunting, wordless Neanderthals. The prehistoric humans may have been quite chatty — at least if the ear canals of their ancestors are any indication. The findings suggest human speech may have originated earlier than some researchers contend. Anthropologists disagree about whether language sprang up rapidly around 50,000 years ago or emerged more gradually over a longer period of time..."

Comments

More than one conclusion.

[rhun32]

Another explanation is that our speech developed to use the frequencies they use because that's what our ears responded to best.

Re:More than one conclusion.

[zappepcs]

I'm with you on that. Evolution has more than one input or constraint. Even in the non-speaking animal world, communication occurs regularly. I find it difficult to surmise that because there is no record, it probably didn't happen. The development of many varied languages does not wholly support a sudden explosion of language, but a long history of developing communication methods. If it had started and caught on like some meme, it would look more or less alike all over the world despite local variations. It just doesn't seem to make sense that language could have arrived any other way than slowly with local variations vastly different from one another.. such as we see in the many languages spoken on the planet now. We see this even in the written word.

When the world was much larger (so to speak) assimilation of other cultures did not happen often or on the scales we see now, creating pockets of population that developed on their own-ish. This causes different needs for communication, and eventually different languages.

From http://www.trueorigin.org/language01.asp

By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts.

In one short sentence, if the ability to speak/hear is innate in the human brain, then to say language only began abruptly 50,000 years ago is to say that the modern human brain really only developed abruptly 50,000 years ago. Forget the 10,000 year barrier some believe. Evolution is capable of many things, but I believe that the modern human brain was basically intact as we know it today before 50,000 years ago.

The paper at ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/bbs.donald.html also suggests that it's possible that what we think we know may not be true as there seems no direct evidence to support explosive changes in hominids at that 45,000-50,000 point, only fossil evidence of physical changes. It's a good guess, but still a guess. Communication happened from day one, when spoken language we might recognize as such began is nothing but a guess without some evidence of the actual brain structure or perhaps a nice wall painting of someone giving a speech?

Re:More than one conclusion.

[mr_matticus]

That does not explain why the human vocal apparatus matches the peak sensitivity of the ears. The two likely evolved together, as a function of use for speech.

Your theory does not explain why the human ear responds to the 2-4kHz range best. It is true that human speech was essentially predetermined to occur in the 1-10kHz range as a function of that being the most common hearing range for animals (which naturally would be somewhat uniform, so that we can all hear each other), but the human peak sensitivity is relatively low in our overall hearing range (about 10-15% along the line, linearly).

On the other side, the vocal apparatus of humans is too large to be efficient at significantly higher frequencies (and a smaller system would pose other problems in terms of articulation), and simultaneously our throats are too small to have a much lower peak efficiency range. As a result, spoken communication and our ability to produce sound clearly informed the evolution of our ears.

Communication is, therefore, the reason our peak sensitivity is what it is.

Re:More than one conclusion.

[zippthorne]

For many people it is difficult to grasp how a series of random events can lead to a result that seems engineered.

Indeed. People just like you , Mr. (or Ms.) AC. GP had a very clear and plausible explanation which, even if incorrect, would not be incorrect for any of the reasons you specified.

It's not a coincidence. All those chance mutations add up to fit the constraints. Knowing which constraints are the most rigid is most certainly important for postulating what drives what.

I don't think it was all or nothing

[dreamchaser]

Language probably developed gradually over tens of thousands of years. The first words were probably danger warnings, then maybe things related to day to day survival such as words for various foodstuffs. I would not be surprised to find out that Homo Erectus had rudimentary language. Even today various animals have calls that correspond to danger signs, and primates such as chimps seem to be able to communicate fairly well without what we would call acutal language. Communication predates humanity, so it's only natural that apes with big brains (us) would take it to the next level and begin to transmit abstract information using vocalizations.

Re:I don't think it was all or nothing

[dreamchaser]

Yes, exactly. It seems we didn't need writing until we began commerce in early agrarian societies. The need for language probably coincided with the budding technology of our ancestors. Being able to explain how something was done and why was probably pretty important when teaching craftwork, be it firemaking or the chipping of stone into tools.

Re:I don't think it was all or nothing

[porcupine8]

The recency of writing shouldn't be too surprising given the way we learn spoken (or signed) language vs writing. People learn spoken language, period. If a child is exposed enough to a language before puberty, the child will become fluent in it. Nobody has to teach them or explain it to them, and often attempts to do so don't result in acquiring it much faster than otherwise. Gorillas and chimps can learn a basic lexicon, but no amount of teaching gets them to anything resembling the grammatical fluency of an untaught three-year-old human.

Reading and writing, on the other hand, are things that millions of people over the world don't ever learn. Those that do have to be explicitly taught; very few pick up reading naturally from observing others and even fewer writing. For most children learning to read is a very challenging step.

When you compare those two processes, it becomes obvious that spoken language has had time to become very deeply ingrained in our circuitry, whereas reading and writing are not at all. They are things we are capable of, but they are not an integral part of being human.

Jumping to conclusions

[Opportunist]

The ear of an early ancestor of modern human could hear well. So he has to speak. By that logic, dogs should have a far more complicated oral language than we do.

At best we could draw the conclusion that he would have understood words spoken by a modern day human. With understand meaning "being able to pick up the signal" not "interpret the signal correctly".

If his anatomy to produce speech is now also capable of creating articulate sounds that can be interpreted as speech, we can assume that he may have developed speech.

Anything remains a speculation, though. Chimps have hands and can grasp things, they have opposable thumbs and they have shown that they can use tools. That does not mean that because of those hands being able to create tools they would have done it. So far, I don't remember any evidence of chimps crafting anything resembling stone age tools. If you just look at their physology, though, they could be able to create them.

So jumping to the conclusion that what is possible must have happened is quite a stretch. Of course, we cannot determine whether such a human ancestor would have had speech. Maybe if we ever manage to create one from the leftovers we find now and then, we could try to find that out. Until then, I would not jump to the conclusion that what exists must also have been used the way we would use it today.

Re:Jumping to conclusions

[Cairnarvon]

This isn't about hearing well, it's about hearing well in a particular range.
Dogs have good ears because they're hunters, and chimpanzees have opposable thumbs because it helps with climbing (though they have indeed been used for making and using tools as well). There doesn't seem to be any other real explanation for being able to hear this well in that specific range, and like the summary said, maintaining sensitive sensory systems is quite expensive (much more so than just having a thumb in a different spot), so it's very unlikely this would have happened for no reason at all.

It's not at all ``jumping to conclusions'' to formulate hypotheses on the matter.

Re:That's impossible! Got Bible?

[TheNucleon]

Despite my faith, I know it's got to be older than that. So much human arrogance could not have evolved in so short a time.

Which came first?

[Anonymous Coward]

This conclusion relies on the assumption that humans developed sensitive hearing in a particular frequency range because this range was used for language. It seems just as likely to me, if not more likely, that as language developed it took advantage of the most sensitive range of human hearing. Sort of a chicken and egg problem, isn't it?

Bass Ackwards

[DynaSoar]

The fact that the human auditory system is "sensitive" in the 2K to 4K range is no indication of language in us or any hominid, present or past. The average human voice covers 2 octaves, not just this one, and the range of those two varies considerably, from around 350 Hz to 4.5K. It is far more likely that homonid hearing evolved to perceive the most salient sounds, those requiring fight-or-flight response or else used for hunting, thus increasing surivability. The vocal cords most likely evolved to produce sounds at the range the auditory system was already primed for.

Telephones reproduce speech between 400 Hz and 3.4K, because that's where the most information content in speech is. This is at odds with the 2K-to-4K claim in TFA. The portion of the auditory system examined in TFA is the resonant cavity responsible for filling in 'missing' information. Language as normally practiced does not require this. Survival oriented hearing, predating spoken language by several species, does.

I'll be somewhat impressed if they can show that chimps do not have the same auditory system tuning. Chimps do, after all, have greater left than right frontal cortex, in the same area as human language perception and production, and that wouldn't have evolved without a reason either.

Re:Code "Monkeys"

[nawcom]

Darwinism is hardly a focus on abiogenesis. He made a little statement or two, hardly anything that he wanted to carry on his back. Sounds like you're a classic creationist, looking for an excuse to make your dumb illogical assumptions that some male entity created life. Why not female? It sounds more realistic. Oh yeah, the pagan satanists worship goddesses. forgot about that. *rolls eyes* Please read up via accredited science journals on what is currently available as evidence. Evolution has been tested in labs, and macroevolution (always wrongly defined by creationists) has enough evidence that questioning it's realism will make you looked upon as a cookoo head wackjob. Remember all you creationists, evolution is not the origin of life. Get it straight. (I think the last thing I heard from some creationist is that evolution requires faith since the big bang never happened. where the fuck is the connection between the two? Some people are stupid. After all, they are taught what to fear of if they eat from the tree of knowledge.

Unless of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless our voices evolved to exploit the acoustic range at which our ears already had sensitivity.

You can argue that the new find backs that up because both humans and neanderthals had sensitivity in the same range - but the neanderthals are thought to NOT have developed sophisticated speech.

Someone didn't do their research

[Anonymous Coward]

Neanderthals aren't human ancestors - we are as much related to them as chimpanzees. Like chimps, we share a common ancestor, but the Neanderthal is an extinct species, not a half-evolved human (like how the Wholly Mammoth is an extinct species, not a half-evolved elephant). There is much evidence to support this claim but anyone who knows evolution could easily point out why this is so: Neanderthals are larger than most humans and as time goes on a species evolves bigger and bigger unless threatened with extinction. Our ancestors, during the time of the Neanderthal, were like 4' tall.

I bring this up because it renders this entire study moot. It didn't have much of a point to begin with, it was all conjecture, but by assuming that man is a descendant of Neanderthals the whole study becomes nothing other than an exercise in absurdity.

Re:Someone didn't do their research

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone didn't read carefully. The article does not imply that Neanderthals were our ancestors - it only discusses H. heidelbergensis, who were likely ancestors of the Neanderthals. All this means is that if an older ancestor of the Neanderthals could speak, then it's more plausible that an older ancestor of H. sapiens could speak as well. The speech capability may go back very far, even to our common ancestor with the Neanderthals.

Also, H. rhodesiensis, which is considered to be an ancestor of modern humans, may be an offshoot of H. heidelbergensis. They are much more closely related to us than chimps! So the speech capabilities of H. heidelbergensis are directly relevant to the development of speech in H. sapiens.

Re:Hasn't Evolved Much

[Oktober Sunset]

Father I have sinned, I have depicted dinosaurs and hominids in the same post.