ArticleFrontiers in psychology2013
On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
- Gestural Sequences in Wild Spider Monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi).American journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Birds combined calls more than 11 million years ago.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Why did humans surpass all other primates? Are our brains so different? Part 1.Dementia & neuropsychologia · 2024Review
- Syntax and the brain: language evolution as the missing link(ing theory)?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The gradual coevolution of syntactic combinatorics and categorization under the effects of human self-domestication: a proposal.Cognitive processing · 2023Article
- The relevance of the unique anatomy of the human prefrontal operculum to the emergence of speech.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Gesture, spatial cognition and the evolution of language.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Evolution of the human tongue and emergence of speech biomechanics.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The interaction engine: cuteness selection and the evolution of the interactional base for language.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Overlooked evidence for semantic compositionality and signal reduction in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Gesture is the primary modality for language creation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- DLX5/6 GABAergic Expression Affects Social Vocalization: Implications for Human Evolution.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- The sounds of prehistoric speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The vocal tract as a time machine: inferences about past speech and language from the anatomy of the speech organs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Differentiation Between Agents and Patients in the Putative Two-Word Stage of Language Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Language, Childhood, and Fire: How We Learned to Love Sharing Stories.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
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2 authors.
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Abstract
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.
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