Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / June 2004

Early humans may have started talking half a million years ago
By Steve Connor Science Editor
22 June 2004

Scientists have come a step closer to answering one of the great unknowns in
human evolution - at what point did early man begin to use language?

A study of five skulls dating back 400,000 years suggests that humans of
that time already had the necessary auditory bones needed to understand
speech. The findings suggest the origin of language may date back even
further than those specimens, to perhaps as long as half a million years
ago, research said.

Although the ability to speak and understand language is a key development
in human evolution, estimates as to when it first arose vary wildly.

Some scientists suggest language proper only really took off when
anatomically modern humans evolved about 160,000 years ago because they had
the sufficiently complex brain needed for symbolic communication.

The latest study, however, suggests that language could have evolved at a
much earlier date, long before the first cave art paintings of about 35,000
years ago - the first unequivocal evidence of a symbolic brain.

All five hominid skulls in the study were found buried in a pit in a cave
site at Atapuerca in Spain. They belong to a species called Homo
heidelbergensis, which is thought to be a distant relative of the ancestral
line leading directly to modern man.

Because Homo heidelbergensis was not one of our direct ancestors, the
discovery that this hominid was able to understand speech suggests that
language may have in fact evolved in a much older common ancestor who lived
about 500,000 years ago, the scientists said.

Juan-Luis Arsuaga and Ignacio Martinez of the University of Alcala in Spain
analysed the bones of the skull's middle ear to estimate the range of sound
frequencies that they were most sensitive to.

They found that the owner of the skull would have been highly attuned to
sounds between 3 and 5 kilohertz which is similar to the 2-4kHz sensitivity
range of modern humans whose hearing is geared towards understanding spoken
words.

Read the rest at Independant News
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=533948

Comment:
An informal experiment that I did found that the chin boosted frequencies in
the same range (by 2-3db) indicating that the chin has a speech-language
relationship apart from anything else.  If heidelbergensis has a chin then
this would be even more compelling evidence.