Research carried out for this study indicates that the first speech sounds were uttered about 70,000 years ago, and not hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, as is sometimes claimed in the literature.
Language expert suggests Homo erectus learned to speak early in mankind's history, enabling them to cross oceans.
The first theory is that language started with people making different sounds, mostly imitating the things around them, like animal calls, nature sounds and the sounds of tools. Eventually they started using these sounds to talk to each other.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.
It is believed the first spoken word was “Aa,” which meant hey. “Aa” is thought to have first been spoken by an australopithecine in Ethiopia over a million years ago.
Illustration by Finnish cartoonist and illustrator Minna Sundberg. Could a language spoken 10,000 years ago be understood today? Apparently, the answer is “yes.” A May 2013 article in the United Kingdom's Mailonline.com says that researchers have uncovered a language people living in Europe spoke during the Ice Age.
Singing, the vocal production of musical tones, is so basic to man its origins are long lost in antiquity and predate the development of spoken language. The voice is presumed to be the original musical instrument, and there is no human culture, no matter how remote or isolated, that does not sing.
Some of the oldest forms of human communication include talking or making sounds, drawing or painting, dancing, acting, and using symbols. Making sounds such as grunting or guttural sounds at a low pitch or high pitch would indicate either social communication or be a warning sign.
Music on the other hand, is speculated to have existed long before language. The earliest signs of music were found in Slovenia and France in the form of 53,000 year-old flutes made by Neanderthals out of animal bones.
— A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa.
There is no concrete evidence of a single mother tongue spoken by ancient humans, though many experts cite the similarities among the world's oldest languages, including Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, as evidence that modern languages share a common source [source: PBS] .
Research shows that Neanderthals had a similar capacity to modern humans to talk and hear. They could produce the sounds of human speech and had a hearing range necessary to process human speech. “Neandertals could have produced all the sounds in that frequency range, like we can,” co-author Rolf M.
until 2008 when a group of US researchers from the First Sounds Collective digitally converted the phonautograph recording of Au Clair de la Lune that de Martinville made on April 9, 1860 and it is the earliest recognisable record of the human voice and the earliest recognisable record of music.
Language developed for communication, to facilitate learning the use of tools and weapons, to plan hunting and defence, to develop a "theory of mind" and the tools of thought, and to attract and keep a mate. The adaptations required took place over many millions of years.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Much of it, they say, involved cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing, before learning to speak in a detailed way. But in a new study, one linguist argues that human language developed rapidly with people quickly using complex sentences that sound like our own.
1. Tamil (5000 years old) - Oldest Living Language of the World. Source Spoken by 78 million people and official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, Tamil is the oldest language in the world. It is the only ancient language that has survived all the way to the modern world.
The Hurrian Hymn was discovered in the 1950s on a clay tablet inscribed with Cuneiform text. It's the oldest surviving melody and is over 3,400 years old. The hymn was discovered on a clay tablet in Ugarit, now part of modern-day Syria, and is dedicated the Hurrians' goddess of the orchards Nikkal.
1888: 'The Lost Chord'
This is the earliest recording of music known to exist. In 1888 a recording of Arthur Sullivan's song 'The Lost Chord' was etched onto a phonograph cylinder. Sullivan was astounded at this new technology, but had his reservations too.
“Hurrian Hymn No. 6” is considered the world's earliest melody, but the oldest musical composition to have survived in its entirety is a first century A.D. Greek tune known as the “Seikilos Epitaph.” The song was found engraved on an ancient marble column used to mark a woman's gravesite in Turkey.
Many scientists also have considered Neanderthals kind of dumb, a less intelligent branch of the human family tree that eventually was replaced by the smarter and more agile Homo sapiens. Increased agility would have been a critical advantage after the ice ages ended and food became more available.
Neandertals and anatomically modern humans overlapped geographically for a period of over 30,000 years following human migration out of Africa. During this period, Neandertals and humans interbred, as evidenced by Neandertal portions of the genome carried by non-African individuals today.
Some surmise that competition from humans for food and shelter, or evolution that selected for more successful human traits, contributed to the Neanderthals' extinction. Others think that because Neanderthals lived in such small groups, they simply became outnumbered by humans.
Human language and animal language lie in two different areas that are not shareable and approachable by each other. Human language originates and relies on external factor such as speakers in a language community whereas animal language arises and exists in its innate biology.
The First Humans
One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.