Re: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

Glenn wrote:

>Now that data demonstrates the likelihood of language at least 100,000
>years ago, not the 60 kyr of Hugh Ross's view. And the anatomical data
>seems to indicate that mankind was speaking 3 times longer. Theology
>and apologetics simply must deal with this issue.

Hollers for attention and simple, basic nouns of everyday objects may have been in usage for as long as you suggest. Being capable of speech, however, is not the same as communicating in a useable language complete with verbs, adjectives, adverbs and the like. So what is “language”?

The Japanese people (Ainu not considered) obviously derived from the same race as the mainland Chinese people. Yet they speak totally unrelated languages. The Chinese language which is the base of the Vietnamese language, Cambodian, Thai, etc. uses high tones, low tones, rising tones and falling tones to change the meaning of what otherwise would be identical words.

I remember in Thai that a "suah" was a shirt or a tiger depending on tone. (So you have to be careful what you put on your back.) Also, Chinese style words rarely are more than one syllable.

Japanese is entirely different. Tone and inflection change the meaning of sentences and moods as they do in other modern languages. And there are many multi-syllabic words.

Although humans had lived in Japan from about 30,000 BC, the Japanese did not settle Japan until the third century BC. Japan during the Ice Ages, was connected to the Korean peninsula by means of a land bridge. The incipient Jomon, dated from about 10,500 BC to 8,000 BC, has left us only pottery fragments.

Japan as a series of islands has remained isolated from the mainland from about 10,000 BC to the present day. The original inhabitants held on to stone-age life style long after the Asiatic regions to the west had developed urbanization.

I think it is reasonable to conclude that if there had been freedom of movement between what is now Japan and what is now mainland China or Korea until roughly 3000 BC, and there had been an established rudimentary, common language among those people, that enough language elements would have been preserved to at least see a connection. Yet there is none.

During the Jomon Period (13,000 BC to 300 BC), the inhabitants of the Japanese islands were gatherers, hunters and fisherman. If they spoke a language in common with those living on the Chinese mainland there is certainly nothing remaining to indicate that.

Although you can’t take this one example and extrapolate to the entire world, it is an indicator at least based upon actual language usage and not on fossils.

I think you could conclude that it would be unlikely that the sort of conversations in Genesis attributed to Adam, Eve, Cain and Tubal-Cain in the pre-flood period could have been verbalized prior to the Neolithic.

Dick Fischer - Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding harmony in Bible, science, and history
www.genesisproclaimed.org
Received on Fri Jul 2 18:56:31 2004