Hello, everyone. And a very warm welcome to this presentation on the origins of language. My name is david anderson, and i'm a tutor at the international pathway college. Before we start, i'd like to give you some background on why i'm giving you a talk on this topic. Ii first started teaching english for 30 years ago, so i've been interested in language for many years. I've also studied linguistics. The subject attempts to understand how language works. But above all, i've been interested in how language started. And in particular, what the origins of spoken language are. Speech. In other words, spoken language is such a natural phenomenon. We use it without thinking, without realizing yet. It's a key part of who we are as human beings. Everyone in the world today, all peoples and cultures have very sophisticated languages that allow us to describe both are deepest thoughts and the world around us. And I think it's worth noting at this point that not even our closest relatives in the animal world, such as chimpanzees and bonobose of central africa. Not even these animals have this natural ability to express the world in language. One of the questions that is often overlooked is how language first started. Who was the first human to make a sound that we would identify today as a word? And what kind of word was it? Was it a warning of danger to others? Was a threat or was it an expression of happiness or love? And then crucially, how did we humans start putting individual words together to allow us to create more complex thoughts and complex communication? Finding answers to these questions isn't easy. Exactly how language started is a mystery lost in the dark shadows of history. However, scientists and researchers have started putting forward possible answers to win early human beings. That is our distant ancestors, started using spoken language. That is what we are going to look at today. So after some brief comments about written language, i'd like to then look at the evidence for three different approaches to working out how old spoken language is. I'll also go through some of the evidence we have for these different approaches. I also touch on two different theories about how language developed over time in early humans. Hopefully, by the end of this talk, you should have aa much better understanding of how language might have started. All those thousands of years ago. The first problem we have on our journey is that we have no physical record of when humans started talking to each other. We know that language was first written down on clay tablets like the one you can see here. These were first used in an area called sooner in modern day iraq about 3,400 bc or about 5,600 years ago. We can be fairly precise with the date because we have these physical objects, which you can still see in museums around the world today. But we have much less certainty about when spoken language was first used. It clearly has a much longer history. So how can we try to estimate when spoken language was first used? Well, researchers have come up with different ways to try and answer this question, and i'd like to talk about three of these approaches. Now. We do have some physical evidence from the field of archaeology. That is the study of the objects left behind by humans. No. This evidence is not direct evidence of language, like the clay tablet I showed you before. Instead, the evidence consists largely of human and animal bones, cave paintings and stone tools. But there is a problem exactly which evidence should we use to draw conclusions about how old spoken language is. One of the researchers in this field is richard klein, who wrote an important book in 2002, called the dawn of human culture. And now in this book, klein argues that the best physical evidence from archaeology is the appearance of organized culture and modern behavior. We know when organized culture started to emerge because we have found a number of artifacts, such as ancient cave paintings and rock art in many places around the world. Here you can see a particularly impressive example of a cave painting. This one is from a cave in northern spain. The animal you can see is a bison. Now, the best estimate we have is that this painting is about 14 or 15,000 years old. However, there are other examples from the same area that are over 40,000 years old. These are some of the oldest paintings in europe. Klein argues that these artworks must be the products of modern minds and cultures. It's not just the painting itself. The people who made this art would need to know how to collect the best materials from nature, to make the colors and also how to make the painting tools as well. 
So for klein, art like this can only exist in societies with aa complex, modern spoken language. In other words, the appearance of art, approximately 50,000 years ago, signals the arrival of complex spoken languages. However, not everyone agrees with clients approach. Another way to estimate the age of spoken language is to examine the bones of some of the first humans. The species we call homo sapiens. When archaeologists look at the neck bones from these early humans, we find that about 100,000 years ago, there was a change in the position and shape of the part of the throat. Will we make the sounds we used to talk? The name for this is the larynx that spelled larynx in an influential article from 1984, philip lieberman argued that it was precisely this change in our larynx that allowed those early humans to make the same kinds of sounds that we make today. He argues that before this, the number of different signs we could make would be more limited.  So in other words, the change in biology may have made it easier for us to make a wider range of noise, but that doesn't necessarily mean spoken language. Actually started at that time. It may, in fact, be much older. The third approach I want to look at, it comes from those who have a different view of what evidence from archaeology we should focus on. In this view, it is not a change in our larynx or the first art that signals the beginning of spoken language. Instead, these researchers argue that the evidence we need to focus on in our quest for the origin of spoken language is the widespread use of tools. Here in the image, you can see some examples of the earliest stone tools. These particular examples were found in kenya in africa, and they have been dated using the latest techniques at the age. They are thought to be approximately 1 . 76 million years old. That is an unimaginable long time ago, and long before our own species, homo sapiens walk to the earth. Notice how similar these stone tools are in terms of shape, design, and material. You might be asking yourself how this can be used as evidence for spoken language. In 2012, researchers published a paper entitled stone tools, language, and the brain in human evolution. The paper argues that the stone tools are so similar. Yet they have been found over large parts of africa with age differences of thousands of years. So this seems to be clear evidence that there was some kind of communication, some kind of organized culture. Spoken language would allow these early humans to talk about where to find the best rocks, and also talk about how to make the sharpest and most useful tools by hitting stones together to break off small pieces. If this technological knowledge was passed between early humans and also between generations over thousands of years, then surely it is a sign that spoken language was used to communicate ideas. Now, the authors call this technological pedagogy hypothesis. Or in other words, the idea that the teaching of technical skills can only happen if it is supported by spoken language. And interestingly, more recent brain imaging studies further support this hypothesis. Researchers from the university of liverpool, they recruited some expert makers of historic tools and monitored the tool makers brains during various vigorous activity, including when making stone tools. Now the team monitor changes in the brain during various other activities. And they found amazingly the tool making and language use similar parts of the brain, including the parks involved in speech. The researchers suggest this supports style and shaman needs argument that language and to making co evolved, meaning they developed at the same time. If this hypothesis is true, it means that the first spoken human language may well be an incredible 1 . 7 to 1 . 8 million years old. Some researchers are not convinced, however, they have claimed that brain scans used in the experiments might not be reliable. Others are question whether just because there is a link between the brain functions and regions involved in language and tool making, it doesn't necessarily prove they began or evolved at the same time. So as you have seen, there is a very wide variety of views on when spoken language was first used, ranging from tens of thousands of years ago to more than 1 million years ago. It seems like these are impossible questions to answer. And for the moment, i'm going to leave you to think about them. We need now to move on to another important idea in our story. So i'd like to turn out to another issue when considering how language first started and how it developed. This issue centers on the debate between those researchers who believe that spoken language developed slowly over time. And those who believe it appeared quite suddenly, perhaps over a few 100 years. I'd like to cover these two approaches now. First, let's consider those who believe in what we call the continuity approach. And continuity here means that the develop the development of language is something that happened over long periods of time, and without any sudden changes. One of the most influential champions of this approach is michael tomasello. That's about tomase double lo now tomasello starts from the idea that spoken language is extremely complex. It has so many different words, different grammar rules, different systems of pronunciation. And this means that it couldn't have appeared suddenly from nothing. Modern spoken languages must have developed from something that came before it, such as a simpler form of language. He argues that spoken language must have started with a simple language and developed into a much more complex one over long periods of time. In fact, this process must have taken many hundreds of thousands of years. There is indeed evidence for the continuity approach, take the way the english language has evolved or changed over time. English speakers today find it very difficult to understand the plays and poetry of shakespeare from 500 years ago, because the grammar and punctuation have gradually changed so much. The words we need to talk about ourselves and our environment have changed as the world around us has changed. So what is key? I think, to the continuity approach is the idea that spoken language is something that is learned and passed from parents to children. In other words, it is a cultural process. As a result, languages developed slowly because of this social interaction, this cultural process. Let's now look at an alternative view called the discontinuity approach, where it's not that the development of language was actually quite a sudden process. In other words, there was a jump in human development. One of the most famous supporters of this approach is a noam chomsky. That's a spelled chomsky and choose he asks why it is that humans are the only species that can talk. What is it that makes us special? And the answer that he gives is that for humans, our ability to use language is in it, meaning humans are born with the capacity to use language in ways that no other animals are. So for chomsky, our spoken language can't be compared with the language of any other species of animal. Do we have any evidence for this approach? Animals have been making noises for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet they still haven't developed a spoken language that can be compared to any modern human language. If you imagine a mouse living with a family of mice, how long do you think it will take that most to develop a spoken language that can be compared to human language? 100 years, 1 million years. It's very difficult to imagine a mouse ever developing a complex spoken language. It's simply not capable in terms of biology. Yet human babies are born without language, But before long they can communicate using words, they can say new things. They can create new sentences that they have never heard before. So this is arguably much more than copying what they hear for Chomsky and other supporters of the discontinuity approach. Spoken language appeared in humans quite suddenly. Trump himself suggests that language, maybe the result of chance, for example, the corruption or change in the genes of a single human. When the DNA of this individual suddenly changed, it gave us the capacity, the ability to use spoken language. So the development of spoken language is about biology and not culture. From that moment, and Chomsky argues it happened around 100,000 years ago. From that moment, spoken language gave human beings are a definite advantage over all other animals. And spoken language then developed very rapidly, perhaps over several hundreds of years. We've looked at a number of different ways of answering the question of where language came from and how it started. But there is still one major problem with all of these theories and approaches. They only claims that are difficult to prove. Sometimes there is evidence to support an idea of claim. There is still a lot of uncertainty and guesswork. As we have seen, we can't be sure of when the first spoken language appeared with estimates ranging from millions to thousands of years ago. Some of the ideas may feel more attractive than others, but really, what we need is more reliable data. And of course, hypotheses that can actually be tested, but perhaps even in the laboratory. In fact, over the last 20 years or so, researchers have turned their attention to designing scientific experiments that might be able to give us a better understanding of how languages develop. Now, we have a better understanding of the processes of the brain through brain scans, as we discussed earlier, and these methods are continuously improving. We're also learning more about how children learn languages so easily. I think these developments should help us reach much more scientific conclusions, which II think is vital to reach reliable conclusions. And then finally, there are always new discoveries in the field of archaeology, new bones, new tools, and new pieces of art that might help us understand the language of early humans. We don't have the answer yet, but I'm hopeful that one day soon, we will have a much better and more scientific understanding of the origins of spoken language. Here is my list of references.    give me a summary, 100-200words