ArticlePloS one2012
Dating the origin of language using phonemic diversity.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Insights into the demographic history of Asia from common ancestry and admixture in the genomic landscape of present-day Austroasiatic speakers.BMC biology · 2021Article
- Language and Emotion: Introduction to the Special Issue.Affective science · 2021Article
- A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity based on phonemic loss in low-density populations.PloS one · 2018Article
- Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2016Article
- Head to toe, in the head.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- The peopling of the African continent and the diaspora into the new world.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2014Review
- Multiple lines of evidence for the origin of domesticated chili pepper, Capsicum annuum, in Mexico.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- Cultural evolutionary tipping points in the storage and transmission of information.Frontiers in psychology · 2012Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Language is a key adaptation of our species, yet we do not know when it evolved. Here, we use data on language phonemic diversity to estimate a minimum date for the origin of language. We take advantage of the fact that phonemic diversity evolves slowly and use it as a clock to calculate how long the oldest African languages would have to have been around in order to accumulate the number of phonemes they possess today. We use a natural experiment, the colonization of Southeast Asia and Andaman Islands, to estimate the rate at which phonemic diversity increases through time. Using this rate, we estimate that present-day languages date back to the Middle Stone Age in Africa. Our analysis is consistent with the archaeological evidence suggesting that complex human behavior evolved during the Middle Stone Age in Africa, and does not support the view that language is a recent adaptation that has sparked the dispersal of humans out of Africa. While some of our assumptions require testing and our results rely at present on a single case-study, our analysis constitutes the first estimate of when language evolved that is directly based on linguistic data.
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