Mother Africa For Language

Perhaps again.  The evidence for Africato be the founding ancestral maelstrom has been mapped through a range of linesand they all point to the same place. Cultural data takes it further and supports the argument that modernhumanity arose on the eastern continental shelf of Southern Africa.

Thus we all quite rightly look toAfrica.

My quibble comes from the realizationthat Southern Africa was the western most part of a tropical world that passedthrough Madagascar, islandchains, southern India and Indonesia into Austrasia when the sea level wasmuch lower.  This tropical world wasconnected, though I would like to see genetic drift analysis on it all.

I simply do not trust the finalassertion.

I would also like to seecomparative work on languages extended to obvious tests such as New Guinea and South America to see how well the idea stands up.

Africa said to be mother to all human language

New study argues traces the evolutionary origin of language to Africa, also the cradle of humanity

Landscape shot showing the snowy peaks of Mt. Kenyafrom the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (ROBERTO SCHMIDT)

(CBS News)  

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/15/scitech/main20054372.shtml

(Updated 5 pm ET) Is Africa thebirthplace of human language? That's the claim made in a new paper by a University of Aucklandevolutionary psychologist who traced the evolutionary origin of human languageto Africa - the continent that also happens tobe the place where humanity got its start.

Linguists have faced myriad challenges tracking the evolution oflanguages as they spread around the globe. The most common tack has been toinvestigate and compare differences in the development of wordand grammatical structures. But the paper, published by Quentin D. Atkinsonin the journal Science, instead focuses on the study of consonants, vowels andtones - phonemes - which form languages. In doing so, Atkinson claims to havefound repeating themes within the 504 languages that are currently spokenaround the world.

As he sought for a way to unlock the puzzle surrounding the origin ofhuman language, Atkinson said there were a couple of clues that convinced himto look at phonemes.

In an email interview with CBSNews.com, he pointed to a 2007 paper thatappeared in the journal "Language" showing that small populationstend to have fewer phonemes, which is what is required to generate a serialfounder effect. He also was influenced by work done by other researchers whoexamined computer models of cultural evolution which predicts the same effect.

What he found was that as our ancestors began to migrate fromsub-Saharan Africa, it affected the number ofdistinct sounds that got used. The upshot: the greater the distance thathumans traveled out of Africa, the fewernumber of phonemes were detected in the languages they spoke. So, for example,English has about 45 phonemes, while some African languages have twice as many.

Atkinson's sleuthing places the so-called mother tongue that would havebeen spoken by people in Africa sometime betweenand 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. That would coincide with a concomitant burstin human creativity, which expressed itself in the development of caveart as well as the use of more advanced tools to hunt animals. AlthoughAtkinson doesn't go that far, it does suggest a link between language andthe emergence of symbolic culture in Africa,such as the appearance of beads, ornaments, patterns scratched into rocks.

To the extent that language can be considered an example of culturalevolution, Atkinson's paper notes that the findings "support the proposalthat a cultural founder effect operated during our colonization of the globe,potentially limiting the size and cultural complexity of societies at thevanguard of the human expansion."

Unfortunately, there's not enough evidence to to zero in any further onthe geographic "ground zero" where language might have firstoriginated in Africa.

"The method can only really point to sub-Saharan Africain general," according to Atkinson.