New genetic analysis suggests the origins of human language are more than 100,000 years old– cosmosmagazine.com

New genetic analysis suggests the origins of human language are more than 100,000 years old– cosmosmagazine.com
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Excerpt:

… A new analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology by a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) uses a different approach to try and find the origin of human language: genomic data.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged about 230,000 years ago in Africa. The new research begins with the assumption that there is a common language or language group to which all modern languages can be traced.

“The logic is very simple,” says co-author Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguist at MIT. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.”

Miyagawa’s team mapped out human geographic divergence using data from 15 genetic studies published in the last 18 years.

“I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before,” Miyagawa says.