95,000-90,000 BP, had a completely modern supra-laryngeal vocal tract: 'These fossil hominids probably had modern speech and language.'30 Palaeontological anatomists also find no reason why early humans should not have had modern syntax.31 This suggests that H. habilis had a form of language, more sophisticated than the half-dozen or so calls that may be distinguished among chimpanzees and gorillas, but still not a full language in our sense of the term. The only hyoid bone (important in speech, linked by muscle to the mandible, or lower jaw) to be found on a palaeontological site was discovered in the summer of 1983 in the Kebara cave on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. The skeleton discovered there was dated to 60,000 BP and was labelled Mousterian-i.e., Neanderthal. According to B. Arensburg, of Tel Aviv University, the hyoid bone of this creature 'resembles that of modern man in configuration and size' and 'casts a totally new light on the speech capability of [Neanderthals]...Viewed in anatomical terms, it would seem that Mousterian man from Kebara was just as capable of speech as modern man.'32 Neanderthal ear bones recovered in 2004 from excavations in Spain showed that 'their hearing was attuned to pick up the same frequency as those used in human speech'. There are a number of other inferences that may be made about early thought, stemming from the inspection of tools and the behaviour of early man and of primates and other mammals. One is the standardisation of stone tools. Is it possible for this to have happened, say some palaeontologists, without language? Language would have been needed, they argue, for the teacher to impress upon the student what the exact form the new tool should be. In the same way, the development of elaborate kin systems would also have required the development of words, to describe the relationships between various relatives. Some primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, have rudimentary kin systems: brothers occasionally recognise each other, and mothers their offspring. But this is not highly developed, is inconsistent and unreliable. Gorilla 'family units', for example, are not kin groups as we would recognise them. One very different piece of evidence was unveiled in 2002 (this was mentioned earlier, in a different context). A team led by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announced in August that year that it had identified two critical mutations which appeared approximately 200,000 years ago in a gene linked to language, and then swept through the population at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans spread out and began to dominate the planet. This change may thus have played a central role in the development of modern humans' ability to speak.33 The mutant gene, said the Leipzig researchers, conferred on early humans a finer degree of control over the muscles of the face, mouth and throat, 'possibly giving those ancestors a rich new palette of sounds that could serve as the foundation of language'. The researchers did not know exactly what role the gene, known as FOXP2, plays in the body, but all mammals have versions, suggesting it serves one or more crucial functions, possibly in foetal development.34 In a paper published in Nature , the researchers reported that the mutation that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees occurred quite recently in evolution and then spread rapidly, entirely replacing the more primitive version within 500 to 1,000 human generations-10,000 to 20,000 years. Such rapid expansion suggests that the advantages offered by the new gene were very considerable. Even more controversial than the debate over when language began have been the attempts to recreate early languages. At first sight, this is an extraordinary idea (how can words survive in the archaeological record before writing?) and many linguists agree. However, this has not deterred other colleagues from pushing ahead, with results that, whatever their scientific status, make riveting reading. One view is that language emerged in the click sounds of certain tribes in southern Africa (the San, for example, or the Hadzabe), clicks being used because they enabled the hunters to exchange information without frightening away their prey on the open savannah. Another view is that language emerged 300,000-400,000 years ago, and even 1.75 million years ago, when early man would sing or hum in a rhythmical way. Initially, these sounds were 'distance calls', by which males from one group attracted
females from another group (as happens with some species of chimpanzee), but then the rhythmic chanting acted as a form of social bonding, to distinguish one tribe from another. From such other anthropological evidence as exists, from contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, we find that there is about one language for every thousand or two thousand people (there were around 270 Aboriginal languages in Australia when that continent was discovered by Europeans).35 This means that, at the time man crossed from Siberia to Alaska, when the world population was roughly 10 million,36 there may have been as many languages in existence then as there are today, which is-according to William Sutherland, of the University of East Anglia-6,809.37 Despite this seeming handicap, some linguists think that it is possible to work back from the similarities between languages of today to create- with a knowledge of pre-history-what the original languages sounded like. The most striking attempt is the work of the American Joseph Greenberg who distinguishes within the many native American languages just three basic groupings, known as Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene and Amerind. His investigations are particularly noteworthy when put alongside the evidence, mentioned earlier, that there were three migrations into the Americas from Asia.38* The latest DNA evidence, however, suggests there were not three but five waves of migration from Siberia into America, one of which may have been along the coast.40 This evidence suggests that the first Americans may have entered as early as 25,000 years ago- i.e., before the Ice Age, and meaning that these pioneers sailed across the Bering Strait. More controversial still is the work of the Danish linguist Holger Pederson and the Russians Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aron Dolgopolsky, who believe that all languages of Europe and Asia and even north Africa-the so-called Indo-European tongues, Semitic, Uralic, Altaic and even the Eskimo-Aleut languages across the Bering Strait in Canada-were descended from a remote 'ancestor', called Nostratic, from the Latin adjective nostras , meaning 'of our country, native'.41 (And meaning that, of 6 billion people in the world today, 4 billion speak Nostratic languages.42) This act of 'linguistic palaeontology' takes us back, they say, some 12,000-15,000 years. It has an even more controversial relationship with an equally contentious entity, known as Dene-Sino-Caucasian, which includes languages as diverse as Basque, Chinese, Sumerian and Haida (spoken in British Columbia and Alaska). The relationship between Chinese and Na-Dene has been recognised since the 1920s but, besides being further proof of the links between New World peoples and those of eastern Asia, it raises an even more controversial possibility. This is that, perhaps, proto-Dene-Sino-Caucasian was spoken by the original inhabitants of Eurasia, and the people who moved into the Americas, but then the earliest farmers, who spoke proto-Nostratic, overcame them, and displaced them and their language.43 This theory is supported by the very latest evidence, which finds a particular mutation of mitochondrial DNA shared between India, Pakistan, central Asia and Europe.44 This is highly speculative (at best), as-inevitably-are the claims of some linguists, Merritt Ruhlen chief among them, who claim to be able to distinguish a Proto-Global or Proto-World language. While Dolgopolsky has published etymologies of 115 proto-Nostratic words, Ruhlen and his colleagues have published 45 'global etymologies' of words which, they believe, indicate a connection between all the world's languages. Here are three of the etymologies-the reader may judge their credibility.45 MANO, meaning man. This is found as follows: Ancient Egyptian, Min , the name of a phallic god; Somali, mun = male; Tama, an East Sudan language, ma = male; Tamil, mantar = people, men; Gondi, manja = man, person; Austric, whose people call themselves man or mun ; Squamish (a native Canadian language), man = husband; Wanana (South American), meno = man; Kaliana, mino = man, person; Guahibo, amona = husband; Indo-European, including English, man . TIK, meaning finger or one. Gur (Africa), dike = 1; Dinka (African), tok = 1; Hausa (African), ( daya ) tak = only one; Korean, teki = 1; Japanese, te = hand; Turkish, tek = only; Greenland-Eskimo, tik = index finger; Aleut, tik = middle finger; Tlingit, tek = 1; Amerind (Karok, tik = finger, hand; Mangue, tike = 1; Katembri, tika = toe); Boven Mbian (New Guinea), tek = fingernail; Latin, dig(-itus) = finger, decem = 10.