Shift from Forests to Plains Prompted Early Hominids to Develop Speech, Study Suggests

Researchers found that consonant-based calls traveled farther than vowel-based calls in open landscapes, indicating a pivotal turning point in human language development.

A new study suggests that the shift from dense forests to open plains during the Miocene era, between 5.3 million and 16 million years ago, may have prompted early hominids to develop language, switching from vowel-based calls to consonant-based calls.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, studied two types of orangutan calls by playing them in the savanna in South Africa, which is similar to the landscape in which the hominids would have lived as language developed.
The study found that consonant-based calls traveled much farther than vowel-based calls in an open landscape, suggesting that the development occurred so hominids could communicate in open spaces, when the physical distance between them was greater than when they were living in trees.
The findings were significant because most modern languages have a heavy consonant-to-vowel ratio, suggesting that early stages of speech evolution were more adept at perceiving consonants than vowels.
The research highlights the importance of studying living apes to learn about our species' story and the evolution of our language.