How was langguage formed? How humans got to be speakars?
Seriously, please talk about the latest and greatest theories or discoveries to account for language origin within human evolution—if there are any updates to this subject, I want to hear them here first. 
I’m not sure I have any updates for you. I was reading up on the ‘birth ground of PIE’ debate the other day, though - I follow the language log blog (here) and they had a post about someone arguing that Anatolia, not the steppes of Ukraine or thereabouts, is where PIE was spoken. The people on that log are skeptical, it seems, but it’s a fascinating debate. Do you have any thoughts?
I saw that, and I was very skeptical, too. It seems people are performing mathematical analayses on data from different languages, which is awesome, but in selecting their data they are basically ignoring the entire field of historical linguistics, because… well, I’m not sure why they would do that.
They needed to do way illitert caveman, who draw on walls, because these wall cant tauk back?
See these posts from a previous thread.
In reverse order
The other post links to this article and includes a larger quote that includes this statement and supportive information as well:
Great question and a bonus question is how was the written language formed, e.g. try reading Dutch!
Same way as babby.
There are also people who argue for an Anatolian origin of PIE on the basis that wheat originated there (in this theory, obviously, PIE would have spread with agriculture).
Some argue, though, that Neanderthals didn’t use an elaborate language, and of course they lived much more recently than 300 000 years ago and used complex tools.
LOL
Are you referring to that language classic, “Rarnaby Budge” by Charles Dikkens. That’s Dikkens with two Ks, the well-known Dutch author?
I’m trying to recall from my Anthropology classes decades ago. But I remember being taught that spoken language evolved as it became useful to hunters to be able to communicate over short distances without having to stay in visual contact to see hand signals.
And written language started as basically accounting, with merchants writing down inventories and such. I recall that the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian etc writings were just inventory lists. If you could learn to make these markings, you could be hired and get a leg up statuswise.
Didn’t Terrance McKenna have some crackpot theory about hallucinagenic mushrooms starting human symbolic language?
Burroughs of course had the theory language is a virus from space, but he did not even add a pretense of reality to it.
Yet they have no basis for the belief that Neanderthals did not “an elaborate language”, be it either spoken or gestural or some combination thereof. They did have the gene that is associated with language, FOXP2. While the debate is not settled the current consensus is leaning to the conclusion that they did have language.
My first reaction on seeing the title and the first post in this thread was to say, “Oh, no, Johanna has had a stroke. She’s always been one of the most literate posters on the SDMB. She knows a great deal about linguistics. Something must have happened to her to mess up her mind. We got to get help for her.” O.K., it’s just a joke. I hope.
I had a similar reaction. Isn’t **Johanna **a professional linguistics person? Certainly a very knowledgeable one. Maybe someone’s hijacked her login. Or you and me are missing the point of the OP.
Someone hijacked my login once and posted a question like what is shit? hoping to embarass me. With the questions I usually post however no one noticed.
I, too, was surprised. Something is amiss. In fact, I will report this thread just in case.
Know Your Meme:
How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?
Johanna has made two posts subsequent to this one, both of which look normal to me. I presume she is just joking around.
Well, that’s the point. The OP does not look normal at all. Of all people to misspell “language.” Twice. And “speakar.” The fragmentare “How humans got to be speakars [sic].” It’s enough to make us suspicious that someone is pulling our leg with his account. Compare that to a post like this or yesterday’s. Yeah, it’s enough to cause us to twitch our collective antennae.