Scientists discover first human language
Researchers at the University of Western Australia were able to show which language was most likely the first human language.
The researchers asked the volunteers to try to replace the words using only onomatopoeia or gestures. It turns out that gestures at the same time most effectively convey the meaning of words and are often the same in different cultures.
The authors of this work wrote: “The versatility of gestures means that they are well suited to initial contact between modern humans, and this supports the hypothesis that it was gestures that became the basis for the creation of the first language.”
Active gestures can also reinforce familiar phrases or make them more memorable. All this may explain the annoying habit of popular politicians to accompany their speeches with sharp movements of hands, as if they were cutting the air or pushing away, to emphasize the importance of their statements. Residents of some southern countries, such as the Italians, are especially famous for this.
The first experiment involved 30 volunteers from Australia and 30 from Vanuatu, a small Pacific nation in Melanesia. They were asked to play a game such as solving charades.
In the first round, one person – the host – tried to describe the word using gestures, and the rest tried to guess what it could be. In the second round, the subject was asked to use non-articulated sounds for himself. As a result, it turned out that the gestures most effectively conveyed the meaning of the words, in addition, they were often similar in the participants of the experiment from Australia and Vanuatu.
In the second stage, the researchers repeated the same experiment, but with people with visual impairments, who were also instructed to convey the words with gestures or grunts. It turned out that in this case, too, the gestures were much more effective than bellowing and snoring, even though the visually impaired people did not have such clear general visual cues.
As a result of all these experiments, it was concluded that the theory of language origin based on gestures was confirmed: sign signals can be considered more universal than vocal signals. This is true across cultures and even for participants with severe visual impairments.
