Comment by ClayFerguson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ClayFerguson | Hacker News Reader

175 million years ago all continents were merged into one, and about 65 million years ago primates appeared. If there is an actual historical link to this language pattern, one possible explanation is that animals were able to make sounds with vocal cords well before (like 100 million years before) we actually were primates. This is not far fetched at all. Recently dolphins were found to be having actual conversations. I mean mammals had been around 20 million years BEFORE the continents broke apart so perhaps there has always been a "segment" of mammals that had the right brain nodules to control speech and the requisite vocal cords also. Possibly the dino killing asteroid killed off most of the 'talking mammals' and only left one group of mammals that had these verbalizations, which were for some reason only transferred down one evolutionary branch of the tree that ended up at humans. It makes sense that it would always follow the branch of the volutionary tree that represents the highest intelligence. Language and intelligence reinforce each other in an evolutionary sense, so perhaps the value of speech just died out because it had little value in most animals because they had no intelligence to develop it further.

This is a completely unnecessary hypothesis. At some point early on all humankind was geographically co-located. If there are somewhat universal features to language that were transmitted memetically, it's a much more reasonable hypothesis that these are choices that were made before humanity spread too widely.

The thing that makes this a mystery is that we think the continents separated 175 million years ago, but primates didn't evolve until only 50 million years ago. I guess if there were still land-bridges between the continents 50 million years ago, then it makes sense that all humans are from the same small tribe that spoke the same "original" language. Problem solved. But my point was that language could have existed long before primates, and no one knows if that's right or wrong. The fact that monkeys don't talk is moot, because they are already 98% identical to humans so you can't make any argument based on similarity. Based on genetics there is no analysis that would have predicted monkeys wouldn't be able to speak, or for that matter be as intelligent as man.

> I guess if there were still land-bridges between the continents 50 million years ago

There are land connections between two groups (of 3 and 2) of the inhabited continents today, and as recently as 11,000 years ago five of the six human-inhabited continents were mutually connected by land.

Yeah the simplest explanation is the conventional one, which is that all humans came from a common tribe that migrated out of africa long after the continents had separated mostly, and the way they got to some of the continents had to have been by boat. My initial post was merely saying how interesting it would be that language could have evolved well before primates, and we would have no way of knowing it. All you have to do is look at the fact that dolphins have language, and are very intelligent. Intelligence and language is far from being specific to human brains.

> animals were able to make sounds with vocal cords well before (like 100 million years before)

Um, no. Even between chimps and ourselves lies a vast gulf of unpronounceability, just due to vocal chord physics. Yet more interesting is the mapping between formants and meaning in linguistics.

Lots of primate species have died off. Since even humans and chimps are 98% identical there is plenty of reason to believe other primates had vocal cords and even language. The only way you can argue against this is to say that you know the 2% difference between man and chimp contains instructions for vocal cords that could never have appeared in the past which is obviously a wild guess on your part. Neither one of us knows so your "um, no" snarkyness is nothing but that. snarkyness.

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