Likely area of language origin, in white, based on: A) phonemes
found in individual languages and B) phoneme diversity averaged
across language families What’s the News: Southern Africa may be
the birthplace of human language, according a new study
published yesterday in Science. The study further suggests that
language may have arisen only once, with one ancestral language
giving rise to all modern tongues, an idea linguists have long
debated. This finding parallels the human migrations out of
Africa supported by genetic and fossil evidence. What’s the
News: Archeologists have discovered thousands of stone tools in
Texas that are over 15,000 years old. The find is important
because it is over 2,000 years older than the so-called Clovis
culture, which had previously thought to be the first human
culture in North America. As Texas A&M University anthropologist
Michael Waters says, “This is almost like a baseball bat to the
side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and
say, ‘hey, there are pre