gah!

"He analysed the number of phonemes found in 504 world languages, and hypothesized that languages with the most phonemes were the oldest. Also, the dialects furthest away from the 'mother tongue' were found to be less complicated."

I'd like to see the original study, since this sounds like simplistic analysis and circular reasoning.

long-story short: there's no reason to think that we started out with lots of phonemes and that these have been whittled away over time. Historical change shows lots of instances of new phoneme generation in languages. This 'historical change is simplification' meme is either wrong or contentless.