dating the origin of language using phonemic diversity约会使用语音语言多样性的起源.pdf

Dating the Origin of Language Using Phonemic Diversity 1. 2 . Charles Perreault , Sarah Mathew * 1 Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America, 2 Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract Language is a key adaptation of our species, yet we do not know when it evolved. Here, we use data on language phonemic diversity to estimate a minimum date for the origin of language. We take advantage of the fact that phonemic diversity evolves slowly and use it as a clock to calculate how long the oldest African languages would have to have been around in order to accumulate the number of phonemes they possess today. We use a natural experiment, the colonization of Southeast Asia and Andaman Islands, to estimate the rate at which phonemic diversity increases through time. Using this rate, we estimate that present-day languages date back to the Middle Stone Age in Africa. Our analysis is consistent with the archaeological evidence suggesting that complex human behavior evolved during the Middle Stone Age in Africa, and does not support the view that language is a recent adaptation that has sparked the dispersal of humans out of Africa. While some of our assumptions require testing and our results rely at present on a single case-study, our analysis constitutes the first estimate of when language evolved that is directly based on linguistic data. Citation: Perreault C, Mathew S (2012) Dating the Origin of Language Using Phonemic Diversity. PLoS ONE 7(4): e35289. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035289 Editor: Michael D. Petraglia, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Received September 8, 2011; Accepted March 14, 2012; Published April 27, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Perreault, Mathew. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the C