How and Why Humans Started Speaking

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most people know at least 50,000 words and speak around 16,000 per day. We speak between 120 and 200 words per minute and read them at twice that speed. We invent word games like crosswords, Scrabble, and Wordle, and we are constantly adding new terminology and slang to our dictionaries. Our love of words is no secret, but how we evolved to acquire so many words and manipulate them into complex thoughts is one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

Today’s guest is Steven Mithen, author of “The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. “ He explores evidence from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, genetics, and archaeology to unearth new theories about the origins of language.

Beginning with an overview of human evolution during which language evolved, The Language Puzzle looks to our distant ape and monkey relatives to see what their vocalizations can tell us about the foundations of language in our earliest ancestors. Mithen analyzes fossil evidence to explain what we can glean from changes in humans’ vocal tracts over time, and the linguistic implications from how our ancestors made stone tools.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:07.0	When did humans begin to speak?
0:10.0	This is a question that goes back at least to Plato,
0:12.0	and you can find all sorts of different answers to this whether you're talking to an archaeologist, linguist, psychologist, or anthropologist.
0:18.0	Many would answer that it started 40,000 years ago and something happened. we don't know what, where humans started speaking.
0:24.7	Maybe it was a mutation, maybe somebody got bit by an ancient radioactive spider,
0:28.7	because that's when we see cave paintings, burials, signs of human ceremonies, and other group activities that could only
0:34.6	be possible with shared communication that went beyond grunts and pointing at each other.
0:39.4	But according to today's guest, Stephen Mython, this process is much older. Our earliest words go back
0:44.0	millions not thousands of years and by looking at the fossil record we can see
0:47.5	changes in humans vocal tracks over time and how for example stone tools change
0:52.0	over the millennia,
0:53.1	suggesting an intentional innovation process was at work.
0:56.3	My theme is the author of the language puzzle,
0:58.0	piecing together the six million year story of how words evolved.
1:00.8	We look at how language transfers from generation to
1:02.8	generation, how language impacts perception and thought, how infants learn language, and
1:07.3	we're really getting to the very heart of philosophy itself. Do you have to think
1:11.4	to speak, like Descartes says I think therefore I am or to speaking
1:14.8	proceed thought? Reading to the very heart of something you and I do every single day
1:18.4	and I hope you enjoy this discussion about language with Stephen Mython.
1:21.4	And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors.
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