Olivia Strittmatter - Language evolved with humans

April 2, 2020

Outside of class reading 1

Book: Here Be Dragons
Author: Dennis McCarthy
Chapter 7

This chapter will be split into two parts, because there’s a lot to cover, and I don’t want these to be too long to read. In the first part, chapter 7 pages 145-162, McCarthy talks about human evolution and how biogeographic principles that impact the plants and animals also must impact the humans along their evolutionary path. Since I’m a biology major and don’t have any other classes similar to this I wanted to talk about the biological evolution of language and religion, using this chapter as a basis for human biogeography. This blog I am going to do the biological evolution of language, and the next one will be the evolution of religion.
So, biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals, which includes humans. All humans came from a mitochondrial “Eve” around 140,000 years ago in Africa, and slowly spread to Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Within a race there accounts for 93%-95% of the genetic diversity, while the genetic diversity between different races accounts for only 3%-5%. I think that this shows that language and religion did not originate from race, but rather with race, evolving together over thousands of years. Similar to what we’re reading in The Spell of the Sensuous as well as Orality and Literacy, the language comes from the environment where the culture lives, and biogeography and evolution are what changed the environment in order to be best suited for the area. Therefore, language comes in part with evolution and biogeography. I was wondering to myself as I read the chapter, since all humans started out in Africa as one group/tribe and branched out from there, did all language emanate from one ancestral language? Since there’s no scientific way to know the true answer, I think that in some ways, yes all languages come from one primal “language”, but that they quickly separated and developed into different “dialects” that then evolved into formal languages of tribes as they spread around the globe. Then as civilizations settled and expanded and new technologies were being discovered and created, languages became more and more different, such as the differences between English, French, Russian, and Korean; then written languages were created and caused civilizations to become more productive and expand even further. I think that all language evolved out of one primal form of language, but we know that not all written languages started from the same roots, and I think that this is because spoken language is natural, and has been around since humans first evolved, but that it took much much longer for written language to be developed, and so it was created in multiple places, using many different languages as the basis.

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