Language Born in Africa

In an article that I came across, in the New York Times, it discusses how a researcher who was analyzing the sounds in different languages spoken all around the world determined an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. Discoveries of evidence of fossil skulls and DNA matches this finding that modern humans originated in Africa. This article suggests that modern language originated only once, which has caused great controversy. 

Some linguists find this discovery shocking, and believe that since words change so quickly, languages can't be traced very far back in time. The earliest language tree goes back only 9,000 years at the most, according to this article. A biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand named Quentin D. Atkinson has found ways of making that a false statement. He looked at phonemes instead of individual words. Through doing this, Dr. Atkinson found a pattern in around 500 languages spoken all over the world. According to his discovery, the farther away that early humans traveled away from Africa, the fewer phonemes that language area uses.

The map above shows the number of phonemes around the world. As Dr. Atkinson said, the further away from Africa, the less phonemes that are used. 

Dr. Atkinson said that the pattern of decreasing diversity with distance as well as the decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, signifies that southwestern Africa is where modern human language originated. His findings were published in this article. 

I find Dr. Atkinson's findings to be very interesting. He put in a lot of time and effort to discover his claims that language all originated in Africa. 

Here is a picture of the language trees with all of the different languages.