Question: What structure do you think early (pre-historic) language took? What evidence can we use to help deduce this from eg. skull shape and size

Hannah Little answered on 19 Jun 2013:

It’s difficult to use fossil evidence because the organs used in speech don’t fossilise (e.g. your vocal tract, tongue, your vocal chords, brain). You can tell some things by the angle at which the skull met the spine in our ancestors, and by looking at something called the “hyoid bone” which sits in front of the voice box (larynx) (it’s the only bone in the body not attached to any other bone!)

We can use indirect evidence though, such as looking at people with genetic defects which affect their language, as this can show us what genetic mutations had to happen for humans to have language. We can also look at the language abilities of apes and we can study processes of cultural evolution (which is what I look at) to see how much structure in language is the result of culture being passed from one generation to the other.

I’m not sure what language looked like in very early homo sapiens, and even in neanderthals. There is a lot of debate about this in my field and I guess my work tries to create more evidence to get a better-informed answer, but we are still very far from having a definite answer. Some think we had a musical protolanguage, and language emerged from songs, some think protolanguage was more like sign language, some think it was formed from unstructured chunks, and something think it started as very small building blocks. The debate goes on and on, and it’s always absolutely fascinating.