It is also exciting that there may be an older origin yet to be discovered still," said Professor Chris Petkov from Newcastle University in the UK. How would it have diffused? The scientists carried out the brain imaging study and analysis of auditory regions and brain pathways in humans, apes and monkeys. So, that suggests that the larynx couldn’t be the whole story. The They give no evidence of being sharp and self-destructive as we are. The first speech was onomatopoeic —marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang. There is support for this in that there is a gene called the FOXP2 gene and it seems to trace back 100,000 years, which is pretty nice and it’s long before that 50,000-year mark that the Big Bang people specify as being the birth of language. So, the way he describes it is they, “sat for 0.3 million years in the drafty, smoky caves of Zhoukoudian, cooking bats over smoldering embers and waiting for the caves to fill up with their own garbage.” And that is what they did. Unravelling the Origins of Human Language Expanding on the Ding-Dong Theory: One recent study on the iconicity of both gestures and vocalizations as the origins of language suggests that there may be something to the concept of sound symbolism. Please refresh the page and try again. The answer, until then, for many people was just diffusion. But it’s a nice one. The expression language origins refers to theories pertaining to the emergence and development of language in human societies. Lieberman had the idea that human larynxes sit lower in our throats than in animals and that this allows our oral cavity, from the side, to be longer, which allows us to speak in a sophisticated way in terms of sound production and making a wide range of vowels and consonants. Infants can’t talk, but certainly, eight-year-old boys can. There was certainly a kind of nobility about that, but still, that’s not the Big Bang. In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. But, you find it often in the literature and it is interesting. One of the most difficult things is that the larynx only lowers starting in puberty. Predating Ruhlen's and Gell-Mann's work, Tom Givon, a linguist at the University of Oregon, argued that SOV had to have been the first word order, based on how children learn language. So, it’s often been thought that during that Big Bang, that must have been when human beings started speaking. It’s not that the idea is wrong, but it’s just a little less dramatic. There was a problem. Q: Where did language originate from? You’re going to keep reading that, I’m sure, because 50,000 sits well in the memory and at this point, some people have their careers hinging on this 50,000, but I think that the evidence for that is falling apart. The researchers came to their conclusion after creating a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world. Indeed, no one really knows why word orders would switch. Where a lot of it begins is with the fact that it’s pretty generally agreed that Homo sapiens probably began about 150,000 years ago, which is not that long—not millions—just 150,000.