At 03:20 2000-02-03 -0800, you wrote:
>
>
>
>I already told Glen by private email my personnal opinion on the
>proto-languages issue : I think ORAL language is more ancient that the
>human race (homo sapiens), that it existed already by the time of homo
>erectus. I also think that nobody can prove that homo sapiens is a
>different specie from neandertal or erectus, so how how modern cultures
>and languages might be homo sapiens expansion on a erectus/neandertal
>substrate.
>Language appeared at different times and places independently, and I
>think modern languages have a different origin from the begining of
>ages.
>
Neandertal mt-DNA has recently been sequenced and it is very different from
H. sapiens mt-DNA supporting the view that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis
were separate species. And if they were the same is likely to be true at
least of the asian H. erectus which must have been about as isolated from
african humans as the neandertalers.
The archaeological record points the same way. In the Near East early
sapiens first appear during IS (Isotope Stage) 5 c. 75-115,000 (e. g.
Qafzeh cave) are replaced by neanderthalis during the very cold IS 4, and
appear again about 50,000 years ago. This sort of repeated shifts in range
are difficult to understand unless these populations were separate species.
Also in Europe sapiens and neanderthalis apparently never coexisted for
very long in any particular area, but a relict neanderthalis population
persisted in southern Spain for several thousand years after disappearing
in the rest of Europe. This pattern of replacement and relict populations
is typical when one species displaces another, but not of evolution in
place.
When two very closely related species come into contact one may hybridize
the other out of existence (as is being done to the Black Stilt by the
Common Stilt in New Zealand), but if this is what happened with the
Neanderthals one would expect to find remains of hybrids, also there should
be at least some old and unique genetic traits of neandertal origin in
Europe, which there isn't (or if there is they are so rare that they
haven't been found yet).
This makes it likely that if sapiens and neanderthalis hybridized (which
must surely have happened at least occasionally) they either couldn't
produce fertile offspring, or the offspring was in some way less viable
than the parent species.
As for pre-sapiens human species having language - sure, but probably not
language in the "modern" sense. This, I think, was invented very
approximately 50,000 years ago. Before this time cultural change was
glacially slow (the Acheulean culture lasted more than 1,000,000 years!)
and there is little if any evidence of art, personal adornment, use of
symbols or religion, either for H. sapiens and other human species.
All this changes rather abruptly about midway through the last glaciation,
and only for H. sapiens. Up to this time H. sapiens does not seem to have
been competitively superior to neandertalers (who displaced sapiens in the
Near East when climate grew colder), but by 30,000 BP neandertalers were
extinct, also cultural change became at least an order of magnitude faster
(most late Paleolithic cultures only last a few thousand years). Many
archaeologists think that this "change of tempo" marks the invention of
fully modern language and I must say it seems very likely.
Language may have been invented once or several times in different places,
e. g. in Greater Australia which was populated by 40,000 BP at the latest,
and which has always been rather isolated from the rest of the World. There
is really no way of telling, though it might conceivably be possible in the
future to trace the spread of Upper Paleolithic cultures in enough detail
to see if it happened from one or several centra.
Tommy Tyrberg