Hadza Language - Theories About Early Human Language

Theories About Early Human Language

In 2003 the press widely reported suggestions by Alec Knight and Joanna Mountain of Stanford University that the original human language may have had clicks. The evidence for this is genetic: speakers of Juǀʼhoan and Hadza have the most divergent known mitochondrial DNA of any human populations, suggesting that they were the first, or at least among the first, surviving peoples to have split off the family tree. In other words, the three primary genetic divisions of humanity are the Hadzabe, the Juǀʼhoansi and relatives, and everyone else. Since two of the three groups speak languages with clicks, perhaps their common ancestral language, which by implication is the ancestral language for all humankind, had clicks as well.

However, this conclusion rests on several unsupported assumptions:

• Both groups have kept their languages intact, without language shift, since they branched off of the rest of humanity;
• Neither borrowed clicks as part of a Sprachbund, as the Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho did; and
• Neither the ancestors of the Juǀʼhoansi nor those of the Hadzabe developed clicks independently.

Alec Knight has also suggested a practical advantage to clicks: When hunting, the Juǀʼhoansi report that they do not use regular speech, which might spook their prey, but communicate solely by means of hand gestures and clicks. (The Hadzabe are currently mostly solitary hunters.) If Knight is correct, and clicks do provide an advantage to savanna hunters, then it is untenable to assume that they have not arisen independently, or at least not spread from one group to another, over the last several tens of thousands of years. However, the Hadza have almost no clicks in their specialized hunting vocabulary, such as the hunting names of animals, as these are largely borrowed from neighboring non-click languages.