The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several million years for us to get here.
Thanks to these illustrators for their wonderful illustrations featured throughout this episode!
Julio Lacerda: JulioTheArtist
Fabrizio de Rossi: ArtofFabricious/
Franz Anthony: franzanth.com/
Jack Byrley: bedupolker
Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: estitle.info
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References: docs.google.com/document/d/1DAjJ_ni_4y2nZnXfpmrt5KvddrJK-9q3PqDAs6-VDBk/edit?usp=sharing
When We First Talked
6 575 Vistas 667 mil
Caption for 10:18 "Our species is going extinct, but we are being integrated into homo sapien society, *I see this as an absolute win* "
I just came here to read the comments
I disagree
Now do the time we first walked (but I’m still waiting for that placenta episode, Blake)
The loose handball biomechanically tick because snowplow immunohistologically present lest a wide cuticle. parallel, overconfident experience
Of course they talked. They painted part of their stories on cave wall. The rest had to be spoken.
Ah... the good old days
1:01: that is one hot hominin.
I'd love to know when we started naming ourselves.
2:53 ahhhhhhahhhhahhhahahhhahhahahahhahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Imagine Freddie Mercury (Farokh Bulsara) living in these times
Makes sense, since neanderthals are considered to be subspecies of homo sapiens
That trex joke though 🤣
Don’t know why I’m watching this at 1am but ok
Give any species human type hands and intelligence will rapidly evolve.
What happened to Steve
The first word humans said: *wasssaap!*
I wonder if they used sign languages at all
I’m a speech/language pathologist. Loved this !!!
so basically, to current knowledge, spaniards may have been the first fully-fledged language speakers, doesn't suprise me.
4:35 is it weird that I think he's cute?
We are not evolved from chimpanzees, they've been around as long or longer then us and are still animals in the jungle using sticks and throwing poop
Lol silly creatard
EXCELLENT talk . But , it is compressed . Materials presented need elaboration in 30 - 40 minute long lecture . Please , also provide a list of suggested readings .
Hindu are the oldest civilization that's mean we first started talking
Human bad, monke best
2:00 it's obviously saying "what do you want?!"
I love my WI FI 💗😜
Really? This is your imagination, but it didn’t happened this way. You “don’t know exactly” as you said.
And language is constantly evolving. Just a few hundred years ago, English would be unrecognizable to us today.
No mention of the water monkey theory? Prerequisite for speech is voluntary breath control. Adapting to exploit underwater food sources would provide that. Previous PBS Eon's vid noted catfish remains in 2 million year old human ancestor site. (Might be embarrassing if noodling made us human ;) Who doesn't love swimming? Shout out to Elaine Morgan (RIP)!
Interesting that many of the comments are using psuedo-English cave speech "unga bunga" and not a more realistic clicks, pops and whistles
When we first talked the Garden of Eden
Lol silly creatard
So do Americans from Brooklyn and Jersey have a smaller area for creating vowels
I just want to thank this and other educational channels for teaching me more about this. When I was a kid, none of human evolutionary history was ever mentioned in school, apart from a flippant incredulous remark that humans were thought to be descended from monkeys. When I was able to start studying this stuff on my own with the advent of the internet, it has been fascinating to delve deeper into our prehistory.
And than swear words
So Glad to hear of the results of all the recent work....it didn't have to be set to a tangle to cover previously inaccurate conclusions...science is about observation, but it is also about speculation and thought, and re-observing if new observations give a need for a second look....now we can all see Neanderthal was capable of both human speech and human hearing....
She looks like my daughter's child
e
alpha
YoU me, we all have the proportion of our vocal tract and some type of venturi valve in our neck, why do you think predatory animals mostly or maybe even always aim for a bite in the neck, it's probably not only for the aorta but also something that predatory animals or predatory humans sense in that or from that vocal tract... May the night be for such type of animals and the day time for the other type of animals Has any one done research on how much vocal matter one human can leave behind in the atmosphere over ones life span?
1:58 Hey buddy, do this
The first human sound made using vocal folds was probably "bark"
Have you noticed something about the depiction of prehistoric humans? They are all men. There are no womens.
There's plenty of women depictions of pre-humans, but it's usually not rated PG due to Americans crying whenever they see a woman's beasts.
What about languages using clicks like in African languages? No vocals required
its not solely clicks.
Dear PBS Eons, can I ask why when you show stock images of ancient humans in your videos, they are always, always men? Were there no females in prehistory? Or do women have been erased also from the fossil records? It is disheartening to see that it is 2021, and still when we create art about the past, it's just about men, as though 50% of the population doesn't deserve even to be mentioned.
Blame Americans for throwing a fit whenever they see a woman's beast on TV. They probably can't show it due to puritanical babies in the audience.
I dont know about all of you but i first talk when am 1 years old under the table thats what my parents said😁😁😑 Dont take it seriously 😑😑🙏
Ooga Booga
Oooogaaa booogaaa
As far as how language is defined, it is any set of communication signals who's meaning is agreed upon by all parties involved, it need not be vocal but that is among the most convenient. There is also a political definition where a language is a dialect with a flag, territory, and an army.
Ive seen "humans" that still look like tht
@Soft Maps doesnae answer my question la
@Alpha e anti-maskers lol
like what
Growing up I went to a Jewish day school. Evolution was never talked about and I never thought about it. In college I took a physical anthropology class and fell in love. Thank you for this channel! It has taught me so much. I’ve learned to balance religion and evolution in a way that I feel comfortable partly because of this channel❤️
"Bud - weis - er...
Why say lot word when few word do trick?
"ooga booga?"
When men learned to cheat their gf??
Not necessarily true about consonantal sounds. Cats respond much better to high frequency sounds, which is why you need to choose cat names which end in a consonant.
Speaking of speech... 'The way you look is 90% of what you say' Being dressed in a t-shirt & jeans makes anything you say far less meaningful. I actually had to check to see if it really was PBS and not some random EStitler with a camera phone.
oh pipe down😹
It's not clear which vowel sounds you were talking about. You should make the sounds instead of saying the letters since letters represent many sounds.
It honestly looks like my step-dad kenny hicks and his buddies at the local race track in tennessee lol.
How people used to sound?
I think like that when we were a kid we create meaningless words for someone or animal I guess all started like that.
We instinctually create language if we feel misunderstood, small children probably feel misunderstood all the time.
If you have the gift of speech there is no need for all your affected sign language is there,keep your bloody hands still & save energy
First words uttered by human descendants: "Ooo, eee, ooo, aaa, aaa... ...ting, tang, walla, walla, bing, bang"
That's my favorite song!
"...Dow Dow Dow Dow..."
They're not ay eye ewe. The letters enclosed in slashes are called IPA. /a/ /i/ /u/, the most common vowels of all human languages, are supposed to be pronounced as AAH EE OO.
CHUCK NORRIS'S Taught the Very First Humans how to TALK! Fossil are just the one's who Couldn't Get it! They died of SHAME not being able to copy CHUCK!
Navy hearing tests noted I was extreme at the high end at 19, basically off the charts. Twenty years later my son in his high chair would announce "daddy's coming home" when my diesel was a block away. The wife heard nothing.
Title more interesting than the video
Storytelling: Saying "I saw a (Fill in the blank) and it was thiiisssss big!!!" With your arms stretched out wide to your buddies. "And I almost caught it too!!" Lol!
Preventing speech is the worst thing of our modern culture.
I’m in love 🥰 with the host.
"Speech itself doesn't fossilize." "That's so not groovy of it. Unrad. What a square. I doth declare."
@Bernard Taylor If i were to express the train of thought i was sent on from my throwaway comment and your reply to it, i feel i'd be in danger of having my linguistic anthropology degree revoked, especially when i got to the bit about how fossils are as ephemeral as ironic retro fashion. So, yeah, i suppose i agree.
The closest to fossilised speech would be the recordings that have been made over the years
Thank you so much! Jean Aule ruined me for things I like to listen and watch. I'm so obsessed with paleo people and other ancestors that when anything new comes out im on it.
Sorry but [a], [i] and [u] don't sound at all like English vowels A, I and U, which are diphtongs, and in Latin would rather be EI, AI, IU. The Spanish or Italian pronunciation of these vowels gives you by far a better understanding. Anyway, excellent video, as always.
😷Storytelling 😎the oldest profession in the world😉
What happened to steve!? :(
I would love to hear the human evolution of singing and history of the first human instruments! Like if you agree!
*When we first spoke*
The background music is weird
I thought there was some evidence of Neanderthals sailing, navigating and boat building which would most likely only be possible through speech. Could well be wrong about that though.
I love this episode! Well done! Didn’t the thickness of the spine have something to do with speech? Our spines are 3xs thicker than apes. At least I think I read that somewhere.
If they communicated doesn't that mean they used a language of some sort?
5:09 Careful: the sounds are not the letters their IPA symbols look like. The graphic says "/a/ /i/ /u/" but what you said was "/ei/ /ai/ and /ju:/".
SIGN LANGUAGE WAS A GOOD START !!!
I like how she says probably... a huge issue with when we talk about human evolution is bias and wording making it seem like we know for certain that this came from that. In short we underestimate the capabilities of early humans we are unique to other hominids for good reason.
I'm curious... \a\ \i\ \u\ sounds... are they referring to the Latin pure vowels: \ah\ \ee\ \oo\?
I know this is random but do you know someone who is a ginger and you want to mess with them as a red head I’m giving everybody free ginger passes you may now make fun of gingers
Monkey's are my Mutuals. we are related non rivals my kind amen brother.
No
60,000 years ago we built oceangoing vessels and colonised Australia in large communities...I think we could chat...duh
I was just thinking about this topic during my shower today lol!
Did Neanderthals have beards?
neanderthal the 'h' is silent.... apparently
It's sad that since scientists are human, they are subject to some of the same foibles that the average man is subject to. For instance, closing your mind to new evidence that does not fit the "common" understanding of the fossil record. They will fight tooth and nail to prevent the Theory that an advanced civilization existed in North America prior to 12,800 years ago when floods caused by the melting Ice Sheet wiped out those remains. There is plenty of evidence to support the catastrophic end of the glaciation, and although Native Tribes have in their spoken record of "history" the existence of "god-like people", we haven't found much in the way of remains of that time. Some claim the Sphinx in Egypt may harken back to that timeline as an example that doesn't fit with current "Egyptologists". They get super angry that another researcher would have the temerity to challenge their life's work! They have forgotten what they should have learned in school. And schools are partly to blame. They are supposed to teach people how to think and reason and be open to new ideas that have merit. We get trapped in thinking we are smarter than we are.
Imagine a shy caveman.
First words were, " Can we talk about your car's warranty?"
If this interests you, check out Terrence McKenna and the "stoned ape theory" I'm not saying it's the absolute truth but its extremely interesting stuff if you're interested in evolution, biology, psychology and even psychedelics and how they play into our evolution and language.
The thing about having inadequate vocal tracts I find a bit dubious. Surely, if a human language develops among deaf people, I don't see why having a chimp larynx would stop hominids from speaking.
This is horse 💩
Who else was trying to touch their neck to see if they could find the hyoid?
Still hard to believe Evolution gave us these abilities. What happened to pre human species
We first learned how to talk back when we first existed. Now for how we talk today that came about after we learned to mimic all other forms of speech brought by every living creature.
I have a theory that our dreams is what compelled early man to speak to each other. Think about it. A dream is the one thing primitive Man could not experience collectively. Every other aspect of their lives were shared experiences. Hunting, the environment, etc. all things that each member of the group would be aware of without having to talk and explain it. A dream is a unique experience that may include events that would be entirely unique qand impossible for another person to intuitively understand.