Throughout my life, I’ve never had any real problems when it comes to language barriers. In the several weeks I’ve been in Paris, however, I’ve experienced some difficulties because I don’t speak French. As much as I try, I can’t even get myself to pronounce a word in French correctly. This made me wonder why humans have such complex languages, and how this unique human feature evolved. Language is, after all, the greatest social tool we possess (Ardilla, 2015). Yesterday, we visited the Musée de l’homme, an anthropology museum in Paris, and I got an insight onto how this human ability might have developed.
The first part of the museum we visited was the Neanderthal exhibit. Here, we learned that Neanderthals are an extinct species in the genus Homo, who lived in Euroasia roughly 430,000 years ago. What sparked my attention, however, was a section in which morphological characteristics such as the lowered larynx and the hyoid bone of the Neanderthal were identified, and these confirmed that Neanderthals could articulate a great number of sounds: among them vowels. Not only that, but the FoxP2 gene, similar to the one associated with language in modern humans, was present in their DNA. Neanderthals also had intricate social structures and symbolic thought, two things that may be evidence of a complex form of communication. In the brain, their Broca’s and Wernicke’s area for language were well developed. Ardilla 2015 says “It is proposed that grammar originated from the internal representation of actions, resulting in the creation of verbs; this is an ability that depends on the so-called Broca’s area.” This made me wonder how far behind in our history language goes.
Although there is no answer to when exactly language came to be, Seyfarth et al. 2014 concludes that long before language evolved, a system of communication (with many of language’s features) was already in place, even in non-human primates. As of more complex forms of communication, some scientist even suggests that Homo erectus was the first to use language (Everett, 2017). Sociology professor Daniel Everett says that: “This means that if erectus invented language, Neanderthals, born more than a million years later, entered a world already linguistic.” Indeed, Musée de l’homme showed me how languages arise, and just like culture they emerge, die out and evolve. I also realized languages are strong markers of identity and consciousness, that little voice in our head that made us human and allowed for storytelling, learning and who we are today.
Figure 1. Skull of a Neanderthal at the Musee de ‘homme
Figure 2. Me next to a representation of what a female Neanderthal might have looked like
References
Ardila, A. (2015). A proposed neurological interpretation of language evolution. Behavioural neurology, 2015.
Everett, D (2017) Did Homo erectus speak? Aeon Media Group, 2012-2018
Seyfarth, R. M., & Cheney, D. L. (2014). The evolution of language from social cognition. Current opinion in neurobiology, 28, 5-9.