Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago
Name
fpsyg-1-1503900.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
312.78 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ad174bbd1737b327a99a452b7bf1ede7
Author(s)
Miyagawa, Shigeru
DeSalle, Rob
Nóbrega, Vitor Augusto
Nitschke, Remo
Okumura, Mercedes
Tattersall, Ian
Date Issued
March 10, 2025
Journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Citation
Miyagawa S, DeSalle R, Nóbrega VA, Nitschke R, Okumura M and Tattersall I (2025) Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Front. Psychol. 16:1503900.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early Homo sapiens, based
on single nucleotide polymorphisms, suggest that the initial population division
within H. sapiens from the original stem occurred approximately 135 thousand
years ago. Given that this and all subsequent divisions led to populations with full
linguistic capacity, it is reasonable to assume that the potential for language must
have been present at the latest by around 135 thousand years ago, before the first
division occurred. Had linguistic capacity developed later, we would expect to find
some modern human populations without language, or with some fundamentally
different mode of communication. Neither is the case. While current evidence
does not tell us exactly when language itself appeared, the genomic studies do
allow a fairly accurate estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity must
have been present in the modern human lineage. Based on the lower boundary
of 135 thousand years ago for language, we propose that language may have
triggered the widespread appearance of modern human behavior approximately
100 thousand years ago.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900
