Language Genesis

Abstract

Language is a specifically human mental function, although some neurobiological adaptations associated with communication can be found in other primates, in other mammalian orders, and even in other kinds of animals (evolutionary trend). Exposure to language is necessary for its acquisition (culture), there are specific alleles of some genes for human language (gene), and the brain circuits for language are mainly lateralized towards the left hemisphere (brain lateralization). However, some data suggest that the crucial factor for human verbal language, which originates in childhood in both, ontogeny and phylogeny, must be of motivational nature, and have at least the same importance as other genetic, brain or cultural factors. So, this article proposes that language was promoted by the building of love, and that it was maintained by hominid women as proto-language during some hundreds of thousands years through the maternal-filial interaction, until the first permanent settlements of the current human species, between 40,000-10,000 years ago. Also, that it was then when the woman transmitted speech to the man (it is further suggested that this may have been the Original Sin of the biblical Genesis), signalizing this transmission with the beginning of the symbolic thought, thus promoting the first artistic displays, like sculptures, painting or music, which were associated with the expansion of love and speech to the relationship between the sexes, with the consequent diversification of languages, mainly in the last 10,000 to 5,000 years. Love caused and causes human speech in both, phylogeny and ontogeny.