| What does "the very first language to ever be invented" mean? We know that other primates communicate with each other. This form of communication includes different sorts of warning calls, and perhaps also vocalizations for identification. Any human language would have developed from a similar sort of proto-language, without an a-ha moment when two humans finally invented the language. (And if there was such a moment, then the chin would have had to evolve first, for some other reason.) Therefore, I don't think it makes much sense to say "very first language" or "invented." Let's suppose it's meaningful to talk about the first truly human language. In that case, the population of the original speakers would be small. According to the paper you gave, "phoneme number decreases as a population gets smaller." Thus, it would suggest the first language had a low phoneme count. The problem is, that guideline isn't useful for the timescale we're talking about. It's believed there was a genetic bottleneck some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans ). All living humans come from a relatively small and relatively recent population, which means all of the diverse languages of Africa come from an originally quite small population, which therefore would have had a lower phoneme number. Thus, on the flip side, what happens when populations get larger and isolated? Proto-Indo-European shows that it only takes a few thousand years to develop German and Celtic from the same language, and we know modern language can have sounds that weren't in the parent languages. So while the principle might be useful for migrations within the last 10,000 years, that's still quite recent in the evolution of humans. |