The field of linguistics is relatively young so there aren’t many answers about where language came from, but many linguists believe language itself just popped into existence one day. Sure, there may have been vocal communication systems, much like animals have today, but the actual language (as linguists define it with syntax, etc.) came about like flipping a light switch. The actual idea is more complex than this, and it’s not that linguists think fully structured modern language came from nothing, but in relation to the evolution of physical traits it feels a bit more sudden.
I feel like that suddenness is so different from how the hominin traits we learned about this week evolved. When talking about bipedalism we learned that it happened slowly over time. We progressed from walking uncomfortably on two legs only when necessary and spending most of our time on all fours, to full blown bipedalism as our main way of walking. We can see this from keeping our elongated arms even as we began walking on two feet. There were several steps from beginning to end, with branching differences in the way we evolved.
I also found the information about the teeth interesting. Before this I never thought about how much meat we eat compared to how little our primate relatives eat. It makes sense that our teeth would evolve as well, and it’s obvious when you look at us, but it’s not something I thought about. This is especially true in relation to fighting and violence. Of course animals use their teeth for fighting as they (for the most part) don’t use tools, but because I always associated things like elongated canines in, well, canines as for meat eating I didn’t realized just how big of a factor things outside of diet could have on the development of teeth.
It’s amazing how far we’ve come with figuring out our own ancestry by examining fossil remains, to the point we can even find early branches of ancestors that are millions of years old. With these fossils we can find the diverse ways in which the hominin branches changed through time. We can find answers not only in the fossils of our ancestors though. Paleoecology can help us determine the surroundings that these ancestors lived in, or what other creatures lived with them. Each fossil seems like a puzzle piece in the larger picture of how we came to be human beings.
I found it interesting you touched on the language of humans and how it came to existence, because I’ve never actually thought about it and you’re right! Everything we learn about evolution we learn is slow in progress, usually taking hundreds or thousands of years for tiny genetic changes to show up, but how long did it take for language to evolve – and what was its unique process? We know the reasons why we evolved bipedalism, and the evidence is in the hundreds of years it took to happen, influenced by the environment and behavior/reactions to it. But when/how long did it take for language to develop.. I know we learned that recently, they’ve found a connection between a gene (FoxP2) related to speech in Neanderthals and a mutation in our genes, that could mean a connection to basic language in Neanderthals – which would make sense because of the extensive social traditions they practiced, but I still wonder how communication was used in primitive times. Evolution shows hominoids were constantly evolving to make life easier, and I just can’t see how some of these things such as tool or shelter use was done without language to communicate.