"Study Suggests Tool Use and Language Evolved Together" Topic

"When did humans start talking? There are nearly as many answers to this perplexing question as there are researchers studying it. A new brain imaging study claims to support the hypothesis that language emerged long before Homo sapiens and coevolved with the invention of the first finely made stone tools nearly 2 million years ago. However, some experts think it's premature to draw sweeping conclusions.

Unlike ancient bones and stone tools, language does not fossilize. Researchers have to guess about its origins based on proxy indicators. Does painting cave walls indicate the capacity for language? How about the ability to make a fancy tool? Yet, in recent years, scientists have made some progress. A series of brain imaging studies by Dietrich Stout, an archaeologist at Emory University in Atlanta, and Thierry Chaminade, a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, have shown that toolmaking and language use similar parts of the brain, including regions involved in manual manipulations and speech production.

Moreover, the overlap is greater the more sophisticated the toolmaking techniques are. Thus, there was little overlap when modern-day flint knappers were making stone tools using the oldest known techniques, dated to 2.5 million years ago and called the Oldowan technology. But when knappers used a more sophisticated approach, called Acheulean technology and dating to as much as 1.75 million years ago, the parallels between toolmaking and language were more evident. Stout and Chaminade have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans, although not on the same subjects at the same time…"
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Amicalement
Armand

So the word is as old as hitting your thumb with a (stone) hammer?

I was thinking exactly the same thing…….

I just want to know why things got their names. Who decided that from this day forth a handle on a rock shall be known as "hammer" and the fifth digit on each hand shall be called "thumb"…..

Very cool! I've always been fascinated by the overlap of paleontology, archaeology, and linguistic forensics.

korsun0, etymology is your friend. Hammer, for example:

The Old Norse cognate hamarr meant "stone, crag" . . . and suggests an original sense of "tool with a stone head"

Now you just need to figure out why hamarr came to mean stone or crag. It's turtles all the way down!

jpattern2 – yep! I just think, how did XYZ get called XYZ? Why did people in different areas develop different languages?

Language is a fascinating thing. But I still want to know why a thumb is called a thumb….:)