In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients
By NICHOLAS WADE

Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient
mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say
language changes far too fast for that to be possible. But a new
genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of
languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was
part of the ancestral human mother tongue.
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They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive,
spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and
the Khwe, who include hunters and herders.

Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are
essentially double consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the
roof of the mouth. Outside of Africa, the only language known to use
clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in Australia that was
taught only to men for initiation rites.

Some of the Bantu-speaking peoples who reached southern Africa from
their homeland in western Africa some 2,000 years ago have borrowed
certain clicks from the Khwe, one use being to substitute for
consonants in taboo words.

There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very old.
One is that the click speakers themselves, particularly a group of
hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient
genetic lineage, according to analysis of their DNA. They are called
the Ju|'hoansi, with the upright bar indicating a click. ("Ju|'hoansi"
is pronounced like "ju-twansi" except that the "tw" is a click sound
like the "tsk, tsk" of disapproval.)

All human groups are equally old, being descended from the same
ancestral population. But geneticists can now place ethnic groups on a
family tree of humankind. Groups at the ends of short twigs, the ones
that split only recently from earlier populations, are younger, in a
genealogical sense, than those at the ends of long branches. Judged by
mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down in the female line,
the Ju|'hoansis' line of descent is so ancient that it goes back close
to the very root of the human family tree.

Most of the surviving click speakers live in southern Africa. But two
small populations, the Hadzabe and the Sandawe, live near Lake Eyasi
in Tanzania, in eastern Africa. Two geneticists from Stanford, Dr.
Alec Knight and Dr. Joanna Mountain, recently analyzed the genetics of
the Hadzabe to figure out their relationship to their fellow click
speakers, the Ju|'hoansi.

The Hadzabe, too, have an extremely ancient lineage that also traces
back close to the root of the human family tree, the Stanford team
reports today in the journal Current Biology. But the Hadzabe lineage
and that of the Ju|'hoansi spring from opposite sides of the root. In
other words, the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi have been separate peoples
since close to the dawn of modern human existence.

The Stanford team compared them with other extremely ancient groups
like the Mbuti of Zaire and the Biaka pygmies of Central African
Republic and found the divergence between the Hadzabe and the
Ju|'hoansi might be the oldest known split in the human family tree.

Unless each group independently invented click languages at some later
time, that finding implies that click languages were spoken by the
very ancient population from which the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi
descended. "The divergence of those genetic lineages is among the
oldest on earth," Dr. Knight said. "So one could certainly make the
inference that clicks were present in the mother tongue."

If so, the modern humans who left Africa some 40,000 years ago and
populated the rest of the world might have been click speakers who
later lost their clicks. Australia, where the Damin click language
used to be spoken, is one of the first places outside Africa known to
have been reached by modern humans.

(there is another page....)

ej

Might they be even older? Possibly they actually preceded
modern language?

Just an errant thought.

John Roth

         John GW

I thoroughly hold to the idea of meaningful communications ~"before"~
we were very big or very human. When i lay down in our dogness group
its a given fact that if i make a big noisey *sigh* sound it will be listened
to and responded in kind to by the dogs. The meaning apparently in dog
language is akin to "relax time". At the sigh signal the doggies relax
_noticably_ as if i were talking "dog". And dog sneezes are just like laughing
or giggling i think. They start smiling like i told a joke when i fake sneeze.
Now if doggies have language why not early hominids?
And its somewhat _easy_ to attach a click sound to a command or a
request for a dog to learn. WHy not hominids? Of course hominids ;-)

click click!.....i lost my clicks!
Clicks are valuable or so it seems.

LOL!
~ej~

  I wonder how Vince Sarich and his language MRCA for all humankind going
back to 1 mya sit with this, lol. Or Mr Klien who beleives that language
appeared over a thursday night campfire some 40-50 kya. Even in Paabo's
time line these groups diverged from each other close to 80kya and along my
time line close to 140 kya.

 See, now I always have to say don'tcha know when you have one demagog
predicting the world was made in 7 days and another saying it been here
forever, somewhere in between reality sets in and needs to take hold.

 Clicking is very useful for communicating while hunting over non-
click languages, clicks can be made to sound like insects, like
grasshoppers or the sounds that small innocuous birds make. I use a
clicking noise to call my dog, it works very well. The other day a squirrel
(public enemy #1 around these parts) came up to my window while it was
open. Rather yell I made 4 or 5 clicks that I use to call my dog. She came
running right to the window with out seeing the squirrel and the squirrel
had to wonder why this dog came suddenly running around the corner charging
at it, close call for the squirrel. I would argue by mixing a variety of
sounds a communicator can disguise his communication in natural sounds that
only someone who is raised to understand these sounds could cipher.
Certainly they add to the prospect of earliest specific humans as organized
hunters from the early onset versus scavengers as a primary or sole source
of nutrition, such languages would be geared for large prey.

  Human language in terms of complexity probably appeared with modern
humans as they expanded out of africa. However, this is not to say other
hominids did not have language, the complexity of languages of other
hominid species were geared for the cognative predispositions of those
species. The 'click' languages as >100,000 years divergences show just how
different other hominid languages might have been from human language when
they once again overlapped in range. It is even possible some of the modern
sounds of language were borrowed from these regional hominids; however more
than likely humans and non-human hominids has great difficulty commicating
with each other, probably more difficult than we would have understanding a
click language.

  I should remark the Knight sequences have been on the database for some
time without a paper to go with them, these sequences root into and deepen
the africa sequences. They set the stage for a multiwave expansion in
africa, much of what I see lends me to beleive that they expanded from the
region of the northern congo region eastward to kenya and later southward
to where the !kung currently are. The eastern populations appeared to have
been displaced by the 'explosion' that accounts for the vast majority of
the african and the worlds populations with the force spread both westward
and eastward from central african republic, nigeria and niger.

I differ with the conclusion of these authors, I think that the original
expansion in africa sent a few small slow growing groups eastward into
melanesia and australia. These were later followed by the explosion. The
click speakers in africa may be a product of the early wave, and largely
they genetic 'footprint' has been diluted. When Paabo and others make these
statements about when folks left, one has to remember that they tend to use
mean pairwise differences and the argument is whether a branch
statistically exceeds the depth expected from the mean depth of other
exiting branches, whether or not these were earlier. With the addition of
the andaman a case could be made that a small subset left africa earlier,
but not so much earlier that the would appear as significantly different
and given that the expansion of other lines and exclusion of these early
lines may not be wieghed adequately in the analysis. In any case the 40 kya
exit time is not only late, but outrageously late, and current evidence
disproves this late exit time.

  If click languages did migrate out of africa, on might expects exit times
of 70 to 140 ky.