Read: How ‘F’ sounds might break a fundamental rule of linguistics Hickok said that when he was being trained in linguistics, “this was an established, almost dogmatic idea.” The new study is a dramatic reversal of the status quo, he said: “The phrase that came to mind when I finished it was mic drop.” Yet other experts I spoke with told me that setting an upper bound on when speech, and therefore language, could have possibly evolved was exactly the effect that LDT had on anyone studying language evolution. “They’re trying to set up a straw man,” he said. One of the quantitative models the new study relies on, he says, doesn’t properly represent the shape of the larynx, tongue, and other parts we use to talk: “It would convert a mailing tube into a human vocal tract.” And according to Lieberman, laryngeal descent theory “never claimed language was not possible” prior to the critical changes in our ancestors’ throat anatomy. He called the new paper “just a complete misrepresentation of the entire field,” among other things. The researcher generally credited with developing laryngeal descent theory is Philip Lieberman, now a professor at Brown University. “When you’ve got nothing on the table, a little something goes a long ways.” Until the ’60s, people who studied language evolution “were considered crackpots because they didn’t have any data,” Locke says. So the anatomical argument presented by LDT gave researchers something to latch on to. As John Locke, a linguistics professor at Lehman College, put it, “Motor control rots when you die.” Soft tissues like tongues and nerves and brains generally don’t fossilize DNA sequencing is impossible past a few hundred thousand years no one has yet found a diary or rap track recorded by a teenage Australopithecus. Part of the reason LDT caught on to begin with is that language evolution, as a field, lacks concrete data. For proponents of LDT, it was the reshaping of the human throat. “There was always this idea,” says Greg Hickok, a cognitive-science professor at the University of California at Irvine who was not involved in the study, “that there was one thing that had to happen and that released the linguistic abilities.” For Noam Chomsky and his followers, that thing was the invention of syntax. Those speech abilities could include distinct vowels and consonants, syllables, or even syntax-all of which, according to LDT, should be impossible for any animal without a human vocal tract. LDT “told people, basically, don’t bother to go look” for speech abilities in anything other than modern humans, says Thomas Sawallis, one of the authors of the new paper. Read: A rare universal pattern in human languages
In fact, they propose that the necessary equipment-specifically, the throat shape and motor control that produce distinguishable vowels-has been around as long as 27 million years, when humans and Old World monkeys (baboons, mandrills, and the like) last shared a common ancestor. Its authors argue that the anatomical ingredients for speech were present in our ancestors much earlier than 200,000 years ago. This line of thinking became known as laryngeal descent theory, or LDT.Ī new review paper, published yesterday in Science Advances, aims to tear down the LDT completely.
That would mean that speech-and, therefore, language-couldn’t have evolved until the arrival of anatomically modern Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago (or, per a fossil discovery from 2017, about 300,000 years ago). And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient to speech because it enabled its bearers to produce a variety of distinctive vowels, like the ones that make beet, bat, and boot sound like different words. Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors. The larynx, also called the voice box, is where the trouble begins: Its location is, or was, supposed to be the key to language. Feign a phone call if you have to.) You should feel a buzzing-that’s your vocal folds vibrating inside your larynx. Put your fingertips against your throat and say “abracadabra.” (Don’t whisper it won’t work.
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