Miyagawa Shigeru, DeSalle Rob, Nóbrega Vitor Augusto, Nitschke Remo, Okumura Mercedes, Tattersall Ian
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Biosciences Institute, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
Front Psychol. 2025 Mar 11;16:1503900. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900. eCollection 2025.
Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early , based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, suggest that the initial population division within from the original stem occurred approximately 135 thousand years ago. Given that this and all subsequent divisions led to populations with full linguistic capacity, it is reasonable to assume that the potential for language must have been present at the latest by around 135 thousand years ago, before the first division occurred. Had linguistic capacity developed later, we would expect to find some modern human populations without language, or with some fundamentally different mode of communication. Neither is the case. While current evidence does not tell us exactly when language itself appeared, the genomic studies do allow a fairly accurate estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity must have been present in the modern human lineage. Based on the lower boundary of 135 thousand years ago for language, we propose that language may have triggered the widespread appearance of modern human behavior approximately 100 thousand years ago.
近期基于单核苷酸多态性对早期分化的全基因组水平研究表明，从原始主干群体中最初的群体分化大约发生在13.5万年前。鉴于这次以及所有后续的分化都产生了具备完整语言能力的群体，我们有理由推测，语言能力最晚在13.5万年前首次分化发生之前就一定已经存在。如果语言能力是后来才发展起来的，那么我们应该会发现一些没有语言能力的现代人类群体，或者存在一些根本不同的交流方式。但实际情况并非如此。虽然目前的证据并没有确切告诉我们语言本身何时出现，但基因组研究确实能够对现代人类谱系中语言能力必定已经存在的时间进行相当准确的估计。基于语言能力下限为13.5万年前这一情况，我们提出，语言可能在大约10万年前引发了现代人类行为的广泛出现。
