Somewhere in Britain, there is a family where each member has varied speech difficulties. Some members can’t say words like “hippopotamus”, others have trouble reciting words that begin with the same letter. This family, known as the KE family, was subject to research by Oxford University in the early 2000’s to find that they had a rare gene mutation. The subtle mutation took place in the FOXP2 gene, where only one nucleotide was misplaced. However, this research has opened up the world to the search for the so called “language gene” in our bodies.
There are approximately 6,900 languages in existence today.
For a while, scientists thought that the FOXP2 gene was the “language gene” in our bodies. But further tests show that the gene has much broader capabilities in humans and other animals, such as mice. This evidence suggests that there is no one language gene but instead it relies on a much broader neural support system. With the existence of a language gene being much less concrete, understanding where language originates from becomes much more difficult. A 2010 study by neuroscientist Aldo Faisal showed that what led humans from making stone flakes to axes was a shift in cognitive capacity, not an improvement in physical coordination. Researchers believe that as toolmaking became more common in the world, humans may have acquired the mental capacity for language. Liverpool archaeologist Natalie Uomini says: “A lot of people would say that toolmaking came [before language], I would just say that they co-evolved.”
Liverpool archeologist Simon Kirby takes a different perspective on the origin of language, arguing that the human brain alone is not enough to explain language and that we must look at the evolution of human culture as well. Through several experiments with fictional languages, Kirby has found that as a language passes from one person to the next, it develops a unique structure and evolves in such a way that participants could guess words that they weren’t even trained to know. This shows that there is a lot more than just brain function in the evolution language. There is a huge social component, and this makes the discovery of language’s origin even messier than originally thought.
The fact that such an integral part of our society is still relatively unknown biologically is fascinating, and many breakthroughs in this topic have been made within the last 5 years. What’s fascinating about the search for language is that it shows that as modern science progresses, we may not find the answer to the question that we asked, but instead find a whole new set of questions that we would never have thought to ask. What do you think about the origin language? Did it come to fruition before or after toolmaking? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below, thanks for reading!
Source: http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/the-family-that-couldnt-say-hippopotamus
nyrsoccer
No one can be sure how language first came about in humans, but scientists can make inferences based on other species. Humans have evolved into the most advanced thinking organisms on Earth, but at one time we were not yet still had language. Scientists have studied animal sounds from killer whales, bats, and other organisms to find out how complex their communication actually is. Recent studies have revealed that animal sounds have a much closer distinction to human language than we previously thought. If this were true it would help prove the theory that language passes through culture, and is not only existent in humans. Other complex animals could actually have languages that are sophisticated, which would dramatically change the way those animals are viewed. It is commonly agreed on that many species can communicate, but no other species besides humans have proved to have a language.
gergory
Hey Kyle, great article! Horrible name though. I have a few comments on your article. I have always been very interested in the foundation of languages and how they spread to different parts of the world. For example, it is amazing to me that so many countries across the world speak Spanish. Along with this fascination in language, I also have similar questions to Andy. I have always been curious about how, or if, more primitive animals have ways to communicate of their own. After looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language, I learned that there is no consensus on the origin of language. Due to the impreciseness of the time when language was created, I cannot say whether it existed prior to or following the creation of tools.
andybody
Very interesting article Kyle 😉 I’ve always had a few questions about language for example, do nonhuman organisms communicate through language and are nonhuman organisms capable of manifesting instinctual thoughts or impulses (such as the desire to eat) into words? In response to your first question though Kyle it seems as though the origin of language is an elusive question that many scholars believe to be unanswerable. For example, one of the first lines of the wikipedia article on the origin of language within the human species (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language) is the “shortage of empirical evidence has led many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study.”