The Origin of Language
An area of the brain called “Brodmann’s Area 44,” a part of the speech cortex, is not only larger in the left hemisphere of humans, it is also larger in the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas). As reported in Nature 29, 2001, researchers from Emory University speculated that this region of the brain is associated with gestures used by apes for communication, and that, thousands of years ago, it was co-opted for use by evolving humans as a speech centre. (The adaptation of an existing anatomical feature for an evolutionarily new function is called “exaptation.”) This exaptation first appeared in Homo heidelbergensis in Ethiopia 600,000 years ago, but it was well over 570,000 years after that time (30,000 years ago) before there was any direct archeological evidence that language was being used.

(According to Ian Tattersall, an anthrolinguist, language was an adaptation that occurred, as I have already mentioned, long after the appropriate physical adaptions had evolved and were in place. The mechanism by which speech first arose, however, is purely speculative. Male paleoanthropologists seem to cleave to the theory that language arose when men had to co-ordinate hunts, calling out directions to each other, while female paleoanthropologists like to speculate that it was women who originated language, as a communicative skill necessary to keep the increasingly complex social fabric of hominid groups intact. Tattersall has a pet explanation that is independent of both of these – his notion is that hominid children first used speech as a sort of vocal mimicry during play and that as soon as adults grasped the communicative potential of their children’s sound mimicry, they began to use it in practical situations. Eventually this vocabulary of mimicked sounds evolved into speech.)

It wasn’t until homo sapiens began to reside in larger settlements, specifically in Mesopotamia, that the transition from hunter-gathering nomadic tribes into agrarian, city-states took place and the rise of written language began. Ten thousand five hundred years ago, this transition was well underway in the Zagros region of Iran. Two archeological sites there, Tepe Asiab and Ganj-i-Dareh Tepe reveal communities that were already planting experimental crops and using the earliest known clay tokens – abstract shapes in dried clay in the shapes of discs, spheres, cones, ovoids, cylinders, triangles, tetrahedrons, and rectangles. These were accounting devices meant to keep track of the numbers of animals in herds and the amounts of harvested crops that were stored in community storage bins. It is now thought that these token ledgers were the beginning of written language and it that is was in Mesopotamia where linguistic literacy began.