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The ancestor of the great unwashed from across Europe and Asia may have speak a coarse speech about 15,000 long time ago , newfangled inquiry suggest .
Now , researchers have reconstruct words , such as " mother , " " to draw " and " man , " which would have been talk by ancient hunter - gatherer , possibly in an domain such as the Caucusus . The word leaning , detail today ( May 6 ) in the daybook Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , could avail researcher retrace the chronicle of ancient migration and contacts between prehistoric cultures .
The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven. Now scientists have reconstructed words from such a language.
" We can trace echo of language back 15,000 age to a sentence that corresponds to about the end of the last ice years , " say study co - author Mark Pagel , an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom .
Tower of Babel
The idea of a worldwide human language go back at least tothe Bible , in which mankind address a usual tongue , but were penalise with reciprocal unintelligibility after trying to build theTower of Babelall the path to heaven . [ Image Gallery : Ancient Middle - Eastern Texts ]
But not all linguist trust in a single common origin of language , and trying to restore that oral communication seemed unimaginable . Most researchers thought they could only delineate a language ’s roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years . ( Even so , researcher recently pronounce they had traced the solution of acommon female parent tongueto many Eurasian language back 8,000 to 9,500 years to Anatolia , a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey . )
Pagel , however , inquire whether oral communication evolution proceeds much likebiological phylogeny . If so , the most vital word , such as the frequently used news that define our societal relationships , would change much more slowly .
To find out if he could expose those ancient words , Pagel and his colleagues in a former bailiwick tracked how apace word change in modern terminology . They name the most static words . They also mapped out how different modernistic language were link up .
They then reconstructed ancient words based on the frequency at which sure sound tend to change in different linguistic communication — for representative , p ’s and f ’s often change over prison term in many languages , as in the alteration from " pater " in Latin to the more recent term " father " in English .
The researchers could foretell what 23 words , including " I , " " ye , " " mother , " " male person , " " flak , " " deal " and " to find out " might sound like in an hereditary language dating to 15,000 years ago .
In other words , if mod - daylight human beings could somehow encounter their Stone Age ancestors , they could say one or two very simple statements and make themselves understood , Pagel said .
limitation of tracing language
Unfortunately , this speech technique may have reached its limit point in full term of how far back in history it can go .
" It ’s go to be very difficult to go much beyond that , even these slow evolving words are start to run out of steam , " Pagel told LiveScience .
The report elicit the possibleness that researchers could combine lingual data with archaeology and anthropology " to tell the story ofhuman prehistoric culture , " for representative by embolden ancient migration and contacts between people , tell William Croft , a comparative linguist at the University of New Mexico , who was not involve in the study .
" That has been hold back because most linguists say you’re able to only go so far back in prison term , " Croft said . " So this is an intriguing hint that you may go further back in metre . "
