You can see glimmers of this hypothesis in Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s book Genes, Peoples, and Languages which was published in 2000. That was just before a lot of the Y-chromosome analysis done by folks like Spencer Wells was available, although a considerable amount of mt-DNA data analysis was already out there.
Written Icelandic. “Though Icelandic is considered more archaic than other living Germanic languages, important changes have occurred. The pronunciation, for instance, changed considerably from the 12th to the 16th century, especially of vowels…Written Icelandic has, thus, changed relatively little since the 13th century. As a result of this, and of the similarity between the modern and ancient grammar, modern speakers can still understand, more or less, the original sagas and Eddas that were written some eight hundred years ago. This ability is sometimes mildly overstated by Icelanders themselves, most of whom actually read the Sagas with updated modern spelling and footnotes — though otherwise intact. Many Icelanders can also understand the original manuscripts, with a little effort” wiki
But see, this was mainly because they had a written language to refer to.
You’re right, I should’ve been more specific. I had Icelandic grammar in mind when I said that, mainly the syntax and morphology.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here: there are a number of languages with long written histories that have undergone significantly more change than Icelandic has, and while Iceland certainly has a long history of trying to enforce linguistic purity I don’t see how the existence of a large corpus can be tied into the slow rate of syntactic and morphological change.
Yeah, Norwegian would be one. Just to pick one at random. 
And many of their words that have clicks also include “normal” vocalizations. So I agree that this theory needs work.
Are there any words that consist only of clicks?
English would be another. 
That I don’t know - I’ve heard a grand total of about 5 minutes of this language spoken.
I’m also dubious of the claim that animals are not sensitive to clicks. I have read accounts of safaris in Africa where it was noted that a reliable way to provoke a nervous animal to charge is the click of a camera shutter.
Yeah, that sounds like a lot of BS to me, too.
What’s really interesting is that those allegedly ancient click languages have the richest sets of phonemes in the world. English is already among the top 10% with its 40+ distinct sounds, but ǃXóõ absolutely dwarfs it with 100-150 worth of vowels, consonants, and clicks.
Many of you are going to find this horribly politically incorrect, but Africans in general seem to have exceptional linguistic ability. In fact it’s almost as if language post-africa has been on a trajectory down, not up. In any case, I think it’s ridiculous to hypothesize language arose right before the split 50k years ago. It must have had a long history before that (even if some change did occur 50k ago).
And to reflect on the suppsed clues regarding “abstract thought,” it is important to realize that the role of language probably changed over millenia. Today we use language for quite lofty things, but that probably evolved out of more concrete, non-abstract communication. Today we use complex grammar and long paragraphs, but previously perhaps we had an emphasis on sheer vocabulary. Indeed, the question isn’t “when language arose,” as if at some point it got invented, but how it blossomed from barks and howls to us on the SDMB (and again, maybe there was some big change at one of the hypothesized timepoints… but what was it?)
And as for why click… is it possible you can throw out a stream of clicks more quickly and with better enunciation (but we’ve since given up on it as too hard)? Or perhaps our ancestors found it easier to make intricate noises with their tongues than with their (undeveloped) vocal chords?
Not that I subscribe to the 50k year hypothesis, to be fair those who do are talking about “fully articulate” speech. What that means exactly is not so well defined, but one aspect I’ve seen discussed is our ability to nest pretty much an infinite number of dependent clauses in a given sentence. At any rate, it’s hard to imagine that language (of some sort) isn’t deeply rooted in our evolutionary heritage.
Yeah… I don’t know about this concept of “fully articulate.” Anyway, you can’t nest an infinite number of clauses. As someone who has learned from being long-winded, you just don’t do it. Language breaks down: no one listens. If anything, maybe people’s attention spans increased.
I’m still around! For years I kept handy a newpaper clipping from 1994, about the announcement by Johanna Nichols of UC Berkeley that her glottochronological methods had dated the origin of human language at over 100,000 years ago. More precisely, from what I know of Nichols’s method, this date refers to the earliest ancestor traceable back from known languages. This article explains her glottochronology in some depth. Her system of analyzing changes in typology over time is set forth in her book Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time.
With reference to the OP, I think Marilyn probably took the 100,000 year age from Nichols.
This actually fits well with the hypothesis that language evolved in Africa, as the closer to the origin point you are, the more time that there has been for language differentiation and development. When people move away from the origin point, they end up with a single local language again, and differentiation and development starts anew. (The central New Guinea highlands, which show evidence of having been colonized by modern humans very early after leaving Africa, have a huge number and variety of languages, while Iceland, colonized only recently, has only one.)
The author John Barth once experimented with stacking quotes within quotes in narrative dialogue, in the long-winded short story “Menelaiad.” As a result, the center of this quote nesting was printed as a whole line of alternating single and double quotation marks across the page, with a single question mark in the center as the lowest-level quoted text.
Like this:
“’”’"’’’"’"’’’"’’’"’’’’’?’"’"’"’’’’’"’"’’’’’"’"’"
It is almost inconceivable that language evolved outside of Africa, whether it was done by our species or one of our ancestor species. You would have to assume that some non-African population supplanted all African populations at some point. There is no evidence that that happened, and quite a bit of evidence that it didn’t.