Human language was born at least 400,000 years ago – Bolivia Review

The human language unique among living things by their level of complexity and sophistication, born sometime between 2 million and 400,000 years ago, according to a study published by an international team of researchers in the journal Science Advances.

The work, which has involved students of the Centre for Research on Evolution and Human Behavior (UCM-ISCIII) and the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), has studied the auditory capabilities of our African ancestors.

Until now, experts had tried to determine the level of language hominids studying the anatomy of the throat and the bodies involved in the joint language.

However, in 2004 the Spanish researchers of this study, all members of the Atapuerca team of scientists analyzed the auditory abilities of fossils from the Sima of the Bones that houses the remains of individuals primitivos–human genus Homo about 400,000 years ago.

In this work, paleontologists determined that these men Atapuerca as we heard, a finding with “direct implications in the language,” he told Efe Carlos Lorenzo, a researcher and co-author IPHES.

“Humans have a different hearing sensitivity of chimpanzees, primarily because we are able to hear well at frequencies where talk among two and kilohercios- six, the band in which there is the language, “which allows us to distinguish between them phonemes and therefore understand a complex language,” he said.

This type of study, which until then had not been carried out, it is that they have now made fossil deposits in South Africa, where the remains of the oldest hominid world, between two and three million years.

“We are proud, because our work in Atapuerca has opened the doors to other sites and fossils look elsewhere, such as South Africa,” says Lorenzo.

As they did in 2004, these scientists have studied the hearing of two genera: Australopithecus and Paranthropus-two relatives of humans but are not ancestors directos- with the intention of finding out if they were able to hear like us, that is, at frequencies we use

.

For this, the multidisciplinary team included experts in 3D undertook to reconstruct the ear bones of fossils to determine whether they were able to hear like us, at the same frequencies, and were able to have such a complex language as human.

“We have seen that these hominids heard more like chimpanzees, which leads us to believe that they were not able to speak, because they could not distinguish the sounds, so their language could not be as complex or articulated like ours, “says Lorenzo.

The report concludes that the origin of language, therefore, can not be traced back to two or three million years could arise in a first, it is to be found somewhere between two million ago hominids men and 400,000 years ago, the Sima of the Bones.