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Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't say what the headline says. At all. Never in the article does it say that "our capacity for language emerged 135,000 years ago". What the article says is that they have genomically traced our species back to around 135,000 years ago to the point where we started splitting off in different groups, and as we all have the capacity for language we must have had it at the point of split as well (before that all could be said to be in the same local group. Possible, what with those population bottlenecks and everything).

There's nothing in there saying there wasn't language before, nor why it shouldn't have been present much earlier. Early enough that e.g. Neanderthals could equally well be covered.

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Theoretically, it is possible language developed later. Some people hold the position that there is no specific language hardware in our brains, and that language is the result of a socio-cultural process (which then would spread).

Some animals have provably some sort of language, and most probably have them for tens of millions of years, or their ancestors did. No reason to believe there was no language before those 135k. Clearly you don't need something very special and unique to us.

Now where is the threshold when we consider something a proper language and something... less lets say I don't know. Science probably doesn't have a clue neither. The evolution was probably very gradual, ie every 1000 years the complexity grew up by a notch, on average. Compound it to a million years.

Any social species must have a language. Ours is much more complex than what we've encountered in other animals. Our language developed because of its ease of transmission, its capability to convey complex concepts, and because we discovered writing. But there probably are a few qualitative biological differences between us and other species that are essential for the difference in language capacity. Those haven't evolved much, I suspect.

I agree to a certain point, but writing (invented in the past few thousand years) has not led to more complex languages. I've worked on languages for which there was, until a few decades ago, no writing system, and they're every bit as complex as long-written languages.

The qualitative differences between human languages and any animal "language" (scare quotes intentional) include recursion and breadth of vocabulary, and likely a lot of other things to. Recursion and the ability to learn a large vocabulary are probably biological and unique to us, the other things might or might not be unique to us

"some sort of language" covers a wide range. Some song birds learn their songs, but the songs are stereotyped--the bird sings pretty much the same thing over and over, and there's no evidence that Bird A is communicating anything to other birds beyond "This is my territory, stay away!" to males and "Hey girl!" to females. Modern human languages are several steps above this on the Chomsky hierarchy, with at least context-free phrase structure, and in some cases reportedly context-sensitive phrase structure.

What about the speech centers? Broca and Wernicke areals is the closest thing humans have to language hardware.

I'm in the hard-wired camp, but the people that defend the 'blank slate' idea, say it's just a good place for language skills to develop during the normal learning process. Both theories have holes.

What distinction are you trying to draw? To me the headline and the claim the article makes are effectively the same, just with the article claim dotting some i's in terms of assumptions being made (it seems reasonable to simify a headline).

Thank you, I read the same thing! Glad folks are commenting on this.

The above comment feels really spammy/AI generated but I promise I'm a real human and just genuinely appreciated someone mentioning the disparity between the headline and the actual research statement.

That's what "at least" means in the title.

If the title cannot be edited then the post should be removed, IMO.

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