Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Finding: Language pathway in the brain is at least 25 million years old

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

From a brain imaging study and analysis of the auditory regions and brain pathways in humans, apes and monkeys, published in Nature Neuroscience:

They discovered a segment of this language pathway in the human brain that interconnects the auditory cortex with frontal lobe regions, important for processing speech and language. Although speech and language are unique to humans, the link via the auditory pathway in other primates suggests an evolutionary basis in auditory cognition and vocal communication.

Professor Petkov added: “We predicted but could not know for sure whether the human language pathway may have had an evolutionary basis in the auditory system of nonhuman primates. I admit we were astounded to see a similar pathway hiding in plain sight within the auditory system of nonhuman primates.”

Press Office, “Origins of language pathway in the brain at least 25 million years old” at Newcastle University


Paper. (paywall)

But surely the most remarkable part of the story is that of all these life forms, only humans speak.

See also: The real reason why only human beings speak

Comments
Not too surprising. I'd like to see more research on the innateness of writing and drawing. While thinking about those round rock tools yesterday, it occurred to me that the computer mouse is more like a rock than a stick. Humans have been drawing and writing with sticks (brushes, pens, etc) for as long as we've been speaking, but we've never written with rocks. A rock can't be manipulated as finely as a stick, and you can't see what the "point" is doing. But then the rock-like mouse came along and replaced a long history of electronic pens dating back to the 1890 Telautograph. Why did that happen? Was it an intentional dumbing down, a competitive tactic by Xerox to get Apple to adopt a poor substitute for pens?polistra
April 21, 2020
April
04
Apr
21
21
2020
11:22 PM
11
11
22
PM
PDT
'25 M' ie from the first known humans so, assuming they are at least relatively correct, helps corroborates the creation science and scriptural testimony, that Adam had complex speech capacity from the get go (which was creation week day 6, 6k rounded YA). That some other founding animal kinds have the capacity for speech. reference the YeC Moshe Emes series for Torah and science alignment where we find 25M YA calibrates to the tail end of the 1656 anno-mundi Mabul impacts year, the cause and effect for the onset of The ice ages. So the lack of evidence is not evidence of absence of Humans and apes.. w/ speech capacity relatively much earlier in history, than these earliest available fossils indicate.Pearlman
April 21, 2020
April
04
Apr
21
21
2020
06:47 PM
6
06
47
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply