All Languages Linked To Common Source

Old Wolf writes "A New Zealand evolutionary psychologist, Quentin Atkinson, has created a scientific sensation by claiming to have discovered the mother of all mother tongues. 'Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plotted the number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, when significant) against the distance between the place where the language is spoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world (abstract). The relationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central or southern Africa, and that all modern languages do, indeed, have a common root." Reader NotSanguine points out another study which challenges the idea that the brain is more important to the structure of language than cultural evolution.

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Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source

[ArcherB]

altered their environment to the point of allowing them to live pretty much anywhere on or in the Earth.

That'd be the green plants, you know, the ones that released huge quantities of a poisonous gas, destroying 98% of life on earth.

Humans are pathetic by comparison.

Awesome post! Please allow me to elaborate for those that didn't get it.

Oxygen IS pollution produced by photosynthesizing organisms. Before plants, the earths atmosphere was radically different than it is today. There was almost no free oxygen in our atmosphere. Once life began to photosynthesize for energy, oxygen was released as a byproduct of that process, just as CO2 is a byproduct of our respiration. Oxygen is actually plant pollution. That pollution killed off nearly all of the early life on earth, radically changed the climate, and gave rise to what we have today.

So it appears that releasing gas that fundamentally changes the atmosphere is a completely natural, 100% organic function. If anything, by driving SUV's we are actually restoring our planet to it's natural, original condition before photosynthesis came along and screwed it all up!

Eat that, GW hippies!