Language May Have Evolved Way Earlier Than We Thought
Neanderthal Life NASA New research suggests our Neanderthal cousins might have been super chatty. Far from the traditional view of Neanderthals as heavy-grunting prehumans, a new theory suggests that our extinct relatives may have been chattier than we assumed. Humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor, likely Homo heidelbergensis, a species we diverged from as many as 400,000 years ago. We survived, while Neanderthals died out, though at a certain point, interbreeding likely contributed to the similarities we've found between our genomes. We probably interacted and swapped certain cultural aspects with our Neanderthal cousins, perhaps language included. Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, argue in a recent review study that rather than language being the result of a single genetic mutation, it evolved more gradually, starting sometime between the emergence of Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis about a million years ago. They write:...