When Did People Start Talking?

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• 00:03

  From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

• 00:08

  I'm John McWhorter, and for this episode,

• 00:11

  I want to share with you new findings suggesting when language emerged.

• 00:18

  At what point?

• 00:19

  did humans start talking?

• 00:21

  Because the whole idea about it has changed vastly since I first started studying linguistics.

• 00:28

  And I want to bring together some of the things that you may have come across in the news and give you a sense of the story that all of this new information is telling us.

• 00:37

  And it's a fascinating subject because in terms of how language began,

• 00:42

  how this thing started that I'm doing right now, it's very, very hard to get.

• 00:47

  at what the beginning of it would have been.

• 00:49

  Because, remember, it wouldn't have been written down.

• 00:52

  It wasn't that speech started and immediately people started scratching a representation of it onto leaves or something like that.

• 00:59

  What happened was people started talking and then writing only came along about 5,500 years ago.

• 01:05

  So, if, for example, speech began 50,000 years ago, which was the old idea,

• 01:11

  still, writing... would only be at the very end of that.

• 01:15

  And now, as you'll see, speech must have emerged much, much longer ago than 50,000 years.

• 01:21

  So it wouldn't be about writing.

• 01:23

  You can't tell that creatures spoke from their bones.

• 01:27

  There's nothing about the skeleton that shows it.

• 01:29

  And so it would mean that people were talking and it was just a mouthful of air and it was gone as soon

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