Another Hypothesis on the Origin of Language

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

It is agreed upon that among all the living things that have existed and exist on the earth, only humans can speak. Asking us to guard against attaching specific meaning to this distinctiveness, Pinker (2000) claimed that language is as unique to human just as sound‐detecting or navigating capacity is respectively unique to bats or migratory birds. This reasoning allows us to deal with language as something of scientific origin. However, we are uncertain about when humans began to speak.
Generally speaking, regarding the evolution of language, there are three contending theories―monogenesis, gestural and self‐domesticated ape theory. Among those theories, the last two are obliged little to present when human‐beings developed the linguistic ability, because they are concerned with adaptive and accumulative evolutionary processes.
However, for the idea of monogenesis presuming that a long time ago, there was a Proto‐Human Language, defined as the most recent common ancestor of all the languages in the world, the puzzle is critical. Yet, the monogenesis theory fails to show any improvement beyond the original conjecture of dating back the emergence of Proto‐Human Language to the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. We find that Nietzsche left distinctive ideas on the origin of language in several of his writings. Especially, his remarks made between 1869 and 1870 appear to prop up the idea of monogenesis. On top of it, reflecting on “eternal recurrence” and “overmen”, the concepts that Nietzsche made popular, we found out that he would agree on dating the origin of language from some 70,000 years ago when the human population shrank drastically to as low as 2,000 in the wake of the super‐volcanic eruption at Lake Toba.
Therefore, we could hypothesize as follows: Nietzsche would answer that human‐beings acquired the linguistic capability just after the Toba catastrophe, because at that time the eternal recurrence that had shackled human ancestors for a long time suddenly disappeared and the small band of surviving members could not help becoming “overmen” or supermen of entire human species. We ascertained the conjecture with the latest developments in evolution theory, archaeology and anatomical analysis on human fossil. This proof apparently works to support the monogenesis theory. Nonetheless, we see that reflecting Nietzsche on the aftermath of the Toba volcanic eruption narrow the gap among the three hypotheses on the origin of language.