Neandertal linguistic

[s.t. bischoff]

A recent paper of possible interest to some...(available free online at the
following:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Language_Sciences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397/abstrac<http://www.frontiersin.org/Language_Sciences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397/abstract>
t)
*
On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic
capacities and its consequences*

Dan Dediu1,2*† and Stephen C. Levinson2,3†

1Language and Genetics Department, Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands
2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University
Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands
3Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

It is usually assumed that modern language is a recent phenomenon,
coinciding with the emergence of modern humans themselves. Many assume as
well that this is the result of a single, sudden mutation giving rise to
the full “modern package.” However, we argue here that recognizably modern
language is likely an ancient feature of our genus pre-dating at least the
common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals about half a million years
ago. To this end, we adduce a broad range of evidence from linguistics,
genetics, paleontology, and archaeology clearly suggesting that Neandertals
shared with us something like modern speech and language. This reassessment
of the antiquity of modern language, from the usually quoted 50,000–100,000
years to half a million years, has profound consequences for our
understanding of our own evolution in general and especially for the
sciences of speech and language. As such, it argues against a saltationist
scenario for the evolution of language, and toward a gradual process of
culture-gene co-evolution extending to the present day. Another consequence
is that the present-day linguistic diversity might better reflect the
properties of the design space for language and not just the vagaries of
history, and could also contain traces of the languages spoken by other
human forms such as the Neandertals.