Proto-Human Language - Date and Location

Date and Location

The first concrete attempt to estimate the date of the hypothetical ancestor language was that of Alfredo Trombetti (1922:315), who concluded it was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. This estimate happens to agree with current estimates on the age of Homo sapiens.

While earliest known fossils of anatomically modern humans date from around 195,000 years ago, the matrilinear most recent common ancestor shared by all living humans (dubbed Mitochondrial Eve), is dated to about 120-150 thousand years ago. The divergence of the three main descendant lines within Africa, L1/A in Southern Africa (Khoisan/Capoid peoples), L2/B in Central and West Africa (Niger–Congo- and Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples, Mbuti pygmies), and L3 (East Africa, Out-of-Africa migration), dates to about 100 to 80 thousand years ago.

It is uncertain or disputed whether the earliest members of Homo sapiens had fully developed language. Some scholars link the emergence of language proper (out of a proto-linguistic stage that may have lasted considerably longer) to the development of behavioral modernity towards the end of the Middle Paleolithic or at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, roughly 50,000 years ago. Thus, in the opinion of Richard Klein, the ability to produce complex speech only developed some 50,000 years ago (with the appearance of modern man or Cro-Magnon man).