Abstract
In the tradition of Charles Darwin, we claim that the origin of language has its roots in the rise of cognition and protomusic. Driven by sexual selection and other factors such as reward, vocalization may have been the primary onset for the development of speech and language. Gestures and body responses are considered to have supported the development of more complex vocalization. We suggest here different proto-stages from cognition to speech in a time frame of about 4 million years. Homo erectus might have been the first hominid species that used protospeech to express abstract and symbolic concepts in form of discrete linguistic units. Moreover, we assume that complex syllabic structures might have been mimicked to develop linguistic syntax.
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Notes
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Some recent studies indicate that our distant ancestors were not forced to leave rain forest in northeast Africa because the savannah expansion replacing forest territories. In fact, it is unlikely that at any time in the last 12 million years forest was extensive in the northeast Africa (Feakins et al. 2013). Thus, it appears that our ancestors tried to adapt to new ecological niches.
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Hillert, D. (2014). Protomusic and Speech. In: The Nature of Language. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0609-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0609-3_2
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