How Did Ancient Humans Learn to Talk?

It might be the most important invention in human history — the moment a sound became a word — and we can barely date it, because words don't fossilize. This is the story of how ancient humans learned to talk, why we're the only animal that can choke on dinner, and the one feature that makes human language a superpower. In this video: • Why the human throat is built for speech — and why that makes us the only animal that easily chokes (Philip Lieberman) • How a newborn's larynx proves the trade-off between breathing and talking • FOXP2, the "language" gene, and why Neanderthals could probably talk too (Krause, 2007; Conde-Valverde, 2021) • Dunbar's "vocal grooming": how language may have begun as gossip to bond big groups (Robin Dunbar) • Why language might have started with the hands, not the voice (Michael Corballis) • "Displacement": the superpower of talking about the past, the future, and the invisible • Why we still don't know if language is 50,000 or nearly 2 million years old Sources: Lieberman, P. — the descended larynx and the evolution of speech. Lai, C. & Fisher, S., et al., 2001 (Nature) — FOXP2 and the KE family; Krause, J., et al., 2007 (Current Biology) — Neanderthal FOXP2. Conde-Valverde, M., et al., 2021 (Nature Ecology & Evolution) — Neanderthal hearing tuned to speech. Dunbar, R., 1996. "Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language." Corballis, M., 2002. "From Hand to Mouth." Hockett, C., 1960 — "displacement" as a design feature of language. 🔔 Subscribe for more on how the ancient world actually worked — this is Sketchient. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #ancienthumans #humanhistory #anthropology #evolution #ancestors #prehistoric #prehistoriclife