Overview

• Research published in Frontiers in Psychology establishes that humans developed the capacity for language at least 135,000 years ago, based on genomic studies of early population splits.
• The study reviewed 15 genetic analyses, including whole-genome and mitochondrial DNA studies, to pinpoint the timeline of linguistic emergence.
• Findings challenge earlier theories, such as Noam Chomsky's proposal that language developed around 50,000 years ago, calling this timeline implausible.
• Language likely played a critical role in the emergence of symbolic behaviors and cultural innovations, which became widespread approximately 100,000 years ago.
• The universality of structural features across the 7,000 modern languages suggests a shared linguistic origin before the first population divergence of Homo sapiens.