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Women might have invented language — but not alone
Andrew Robinson is the author of books on writing and scripts, including The Story of Writing (1995).
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BaYaka women in Central Africa chat loudly, laugh and sing while preparing food. Credit: Mauritius Images/Alamy
The Revolutionary Origins of Language Chris Knight & Jerome Lewis Yale Univ. Press (2026)
The origins of writing and script remain unclear, but those of speech and language are simply unknown. This is because no physical evidence remains of the earliest language, which was probably spoken in Africa, the birthplace of Homo sapiens. By contrast, inscribed marks on clay tablets that constitute the earliest known form of writing — however mysterious — have survived from ancient Mesopotamia, dating to the fourth millennium bc.
Humanity spoke thousands of languages at the dawn of farming — now many of them are lost
That’s left a lot of room for scholars to speculate on how speech and language began, starting with thinkers from the ancient world, including Plato, who could not decide whether language had a natural or a purely human origin. By the nineteenth century, anthropologists had grown tired of so much talk with scant evidence to go on.
In 1866, the founding statutes of the Paris Linguistic Society forbade all discussion of the subject, note anthropologists Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis in The Revolutionary Origins of Language. “Anyone theorizing about the origins of language risked being dismissed as a crank.” Even so, “from time to time, this or that brave maverick would risk whatever reputation they had by attempting to reopen the debate”.
The best known, if controversial, attempts since then come from linguist Noam Chomsky, starting in the 1960s. The authors discuss his contributions at length, drawing on Knight’s book Decoding Chomsky (2016).
How the world’s largest language family spread — and why others go extinct