[A]ccording to a new study, for a huge chunk of the time that our species has roamed the Earth, we were without the use of the language capacity that is central to the way that we live our modern lives.
According to the study, which was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, it was only 135,000 years ago that our species evolved such that we were able to develop our now instinctive verbal language.
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In their study, the team investigated genetic studies of indigenous Khoisan people, thought to be at the heart of our species at the time of division.
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From their results, they conclude that the development of our species’ language capacity must have happened before the Khoisan people were divided from the rest of homo sapiens, a milestone that happened 135,000 years ago – though they note that at this point, language was really only in its infancy and our behavior still primitive.
