"Revised Timeline: Human Speech Origins Date Back Further Than Previously Believed"

New research by British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that humans likely began developing rudimentary language around 1.6 million years ago in eastern or southern Africa, challenging the previous belief that language only emerged around 200,000 years ago. The emergence of language was a crucial factor in human physical and cultural evolution, as it enabled greater group planning and coordination abilities, improved working memory, and facilitated the transmission of complex knowledge and skills. The appearance of Broca’s area in the brain, associated with language production and comprehension, was linked to improvements in working memory and sentence formation. This new research also suggests that some aspects of the first linguistic development 1.6 million years ago may still survive in modern languages today.