How do you investigate the origins of human language? As linguists Thomas Sawallis and Louis-Jean Boë write, “sound doesn’t fossilize” and by the time a language is written down it’s fully formed. One option is to look at the vocal tracts of our distant primate relatives to figure out what anatomical configurations produce what kinds of sounds and vice versa.

Some decades-old research along these lines had pegged the origins of speech to the emergence of anatomically modern human beings, about 200,000 years ago. Evidence has been building, more recently, that primates can produce the distinct vowel sounds that language relies on. Researchers now believe this ability means the dawn of speech really happened as far back as 27 million years ago.

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Baboons make sounds, but how does it relate to human speech? Creative Wrights/Shutterstock.com

Examining how primates make vowel sounds pushes timeline for speech evolution back by 27 million years

Thomas R. Sawallis, University of Alabama; Louis-Jean Boë, Université Grenoble Alpes

Researchers say it's time to finally discard a decades-old theory about the origins of human language – and revise the date when human ancestors likely were able to make certain speech noises.

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