Only human language is unique among all the ways that animals communicate. Even our close
genetic relatives the Neanderthals are unlikely to have ever spoken, and the so-called sign "language"
of the Great Apes is nothing like human language. Due to the similarities between language
evolution and biological evolution, it can be used to reconstruct recent human history and examine
how culture changes among linguistically related groups of people. It can be argued that language
has contributed more to our species' recent evolution than our genes have in the last 200,000 years.
Although the exact timing of language development is unknown, evidence from fossils and genetic
studies indicates that communities of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, or humans who would
have looked like you and me, lived in eastern or maybe southern Africa between 150,000 and
200,000 years ago. All human groups can communicate through language, which is thought to have
existed for between 150,000 and 200,000 years. This finding is supported by data from engravings
on red ochre that show abstract and symbolic behavior in these early modern humans. Some
archaeologists believe that a late genetic alteration in our ancestry gave rise to language at this later
time because the archaeological record shows that the flowering of art and other cultural artifacts at
modern human sites occurred around 40,000 years ago. However, because most of the evidence
comes from European archaeological sites, it is difficult to understand how the newly evolved ability
to speak a language spread to the rest of humanity, which had already spread from Africa to other
areas of the world by about 70,000 years ago. A discussion on the regularity of language patterns
finally emerged from the first philosophical forum on language. As explanatory frameworks for
language, two fundamental theoretical positions—one that favored irregularity and the other that
believed language was fundamentally regular—emerged. Because of the dominance of the latter
theory, it has been common to explain linguistic inconsistencies by asserting that language has been
tainted through time by incorrect usage; this theory holds that older forms of language are purer. By
the nineteenth century, there had been a major backlash against the philosophizing about the human
origin language that had dominated most of the study of language up to that point. Although the
purpose was less utopian, the interest in history persisted. The mother tongues of nations and
families of nations, rather than the mother tongue of the entire human race, came to be the center of
attention during this romantic era of rediscovering national history. Romantic nationalism
undoubtedly had an impact, but possibly the reaction to earlier unscientific conjectures was the root
cause of the more practical purpose. Analyzing empirical data was believed to be necessary in order
to adopt a more scientific approach. Language is incredibly complicated. Many eminent linguists
have hypothesized that language is theoretically limitless, while it is not actually so in daily use
because it includes built-in mechanisms for combining and recombining (nesting) its many levels.
Similar to how it would be impossible to tell by the observation that the sun is burning itself out, it
almost sounds too intricate to be able to detect any meaningful leveling out of language.
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