When and how did the person speak? According to some scientists, this happened 50 thousand years ago, others call the figure millions of years.
Biblical view
The Old Testament story says that man was created intelligent and with the ability of God to speak. God brought animals to man "to see what he would call them, and to know how he would call every living soul."
But the first word spoken by Adam, according to Dante Alighieri, was the Hebrew word "El" - God. From Adam, Eve and their children spoke Hebrew: this language remained the only one until the Babylonian pandemonium.
Imitating nature
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German historian of the XVIII century Johann Gottfried Herder seriously shaken the "divine theory" of the origin of language, which at that time believed the majority. The scientist argued that speech began to form at the moment when a person began to imitate the sounds of animals.
Contemporaries ridiculed Herder's theory, christening it the "av-av thesis."
Linguist Alexander Verzhbovsky returned to Herder's hypothesis, putting forward his theory of "two-consonant primary signals of onomatopoeic origin." According to the scientist, to convey the sounds of the frightening forces of nature, for example, thunder, our ancestors used the sound combinations "Gan" and "Ran", and the signals "Al" or "Ar" were shouted when they drove the beast into a trapping pit.
The origins of the rudiments of speech, according to Verzhbovsky, should be sought in one or more habitats of the "humanized primate", from where speech was carried to all corners of the Earth. This "humanized primate", according to Verzhbovsky, was a Cro-Magnon who inhabited Europe 40 thousand years ago.
Broca Center
Homo habilis, who lived presumably 2.5 million years ago, is often called the first representative of the genus Homo. He possessed a number of characteristics that distinguish him from the animal kingdom: it is not only the ability to make tools and primitive clothing, but also the structure of the brain.
According to anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky, the brain of Homo habilis is characterized by an increase in the development of the areas that are responsible for speech.
In particular, a noticeable bulge inside the thin-walled skull indicates that it has a "Broca center": it is he who provides the motor organization of speech and control of the brain regions that coordinate the speech apparatus.
Physiologists have reconstructed the morphology of the upper part of the speech apparatus of Homo habilis by traces of muscle attachment on the skull. The human ancestor probably had a massive tongue and lips that did not touch each other: this could allow the hominid to pronounce sounds phonetically similar to our vowels "i", "a", "y" and consonants "s" and "t".
From gestures to speech
American neuroscientists, comparing the structure of the brain of humans and apes, in particular, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, noticed a very significant similarity. It turned out that the so-called "Brodman region 44", which is located in the "Brock's center", both in humans and monkeys, in the left hemisphere of the brain is larger than in the right.
In humans, this area is responsible for speech, and why should such a developed organ be monkeys?
The researchers put forward a hypothesis according to which "Brodman region 44" in monkeys is responsible for sign language. This implies the assumption that human speech could have developed from the gestures that our ancestors used to communicate.
Scientists from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (USA) confirmed these guesses: they found that the same parts of the brain are responsible for verbal and non-verbal human communication.
Evolution of the vocal apparatus
Linguist Philip Lieberman of the University of Connecticut drew attention to the importance of the pharynx in pronouncing the vowel sounds "a", "and", "y", which form the basis of many modern languages. Combining with consonants, these vowels are capable of creating multiple combinations, but, most importantly, instantly link the coded series of sounds into intelligible oral speech.
Together with the anatomist from Yale University Edmund Krelin, Lieberman decided to check to what extent the ancient man was able to pronounce the mentioned sounds.
From the fossils, scientists reconstructed the vocal apparatus of the Neanderthal and found that his larynx was significantly higher than its position in modern humans.
Then the researchers in plasticine recreated the pharyngeal, nasal and oral cavities of ancient man. Having made measurements, they compared them with the size of the vocal apparatus of a modern person. Then, having put the obtained numbers into an electronic computer, they determined the resonances and the range of sounds produced.
The conclusion was this: our ancestors, who lived 60 thousand years ago, could not pronounce the main vowels in rapid combinations. According to scientists, the speech of ancient people was much more primitive, while they spoke about 10 times slower than modern humans.
Congenital function
The prominent American linguist Noam Chomsky put forward a bold hypothesis. In his opinion, human speech is not the result of learning - it is a genetically built mechanism, like hearing or sight.
He sees confirmation of his theory in the fact that babies instantly and consciously extract information relevant to speech from the surrounding noise.
Experiments in genetics make Chomsky's theory quite viable. Thus, the study of the DNA of human mitochondria showed that in order to reach the modern level, speech should have arisen as a result of a genetic mutation 200 thousand years ago - this is, as you know, the time of "mitochondrial Eve".
However, Kholmsky believes that the whole thing is in the evolutionary breakthrough of the language that occurred about 50 thousand years ago, when our ancestors left Africa. The linguist sees the reasons for the "linguistic surge" in the emergence of more complex social institutions, creative activity, tracking natural phenomena and other factors in the development of human society.
Cooperative activity
Some experts are convinced that Homo erectus must have had some form of language, since a significant part of his activities required the exchange of thoughts. The drawings on the fossils of Torralba and Ambrona already testify to the high organization of the hunting process by primitive man.
The American writer Edmund White is sure: in order to draw up preliminary plans for a hunt, name animals, tools, indicate landmarks, primitive man had to talk. And with the establishment of intrafamily and social relations, the vocabulary of our ancestor also expanded.
White's hypothesis can be confirmed by studies of human remains from Totavel Cave (France), which are supposedly 450 thousand years old. Scientists attribute them to a group of hominids, who are an intermediate species between Pithecanthropus and Neanderthals.
With the help of a computer, the specialists recreated the passage of sound from the lungs to the tip of the lips of the "Totawel man." The machine gave the result in the form of sounds "aah-aah", "chen-chen", "reu-reu". For an ancient hunter, this is a very good result.