The Origins of Language

Talking is an activity unique to Homo sapiens , our species

They maintain that the people who drove the Neanderthals to extinction, settled Australia, and carved the Stadel lion-man were as intelligent, creative and sensitive as we are. If we were to come across the artists of the Stadel Cave, we could learn their language and they ours. We’d be able to explain to them everything we know – from the adventur

Perhaps a gesture language rather like the signing languages of the Deaf came first, with vocalizations used for attention-grabbing and emphasis (Hewes 1973; Corballis 2003, 2009). Speaking without gesturing is a difficult feat for many people, and it might be that gesturing and vocalizing have traded places, with gestures now playing the embellish

Le langage de l’Homo sapiens, qui s’est développé il y a 70 000 ans, se distingue par la quantité et la qualité des informations qu’il permet de partager. Son trait le plus remarquable est que, contrairement aux autres animaux, il nous permet de dire non seulement « Attention au lion ! » mais, de plus, « Le lion est l’emblème de notre tribu ». Nous

To the extent that the origins of language lie in music, they lie in a certain sort of gesture, that of dance: social, non-purposive (‘useless’). When language began to shift hemispheres, and separate itself from music, to become the referential, verbal medium that we now recognise by the term, it aligned itself with a different sort of gesture, th