When did a capacity to acquire language first appear in modern humans? A recent (short) paper tries to answer that question.
The paper is Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago, Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Remo Nitschke, Mercedes Okumura and Ian Tattersall in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Section: Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 16 (2025) Frontiers | Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago
First modern humans
The authors point out that previous work has shown that modern humans (Homo Sapiens) emerged as an anatomically distinctive entity by about 230,000 years ago.
First separation
This paper reviews 15 published studies of when Homo Sapiens began to split into separate populations. The authors report that genomic studies of early Homo Sapiens broadly agree that the earliest population separating from all other modern populations was ancestral to the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa. Modern Khoisan peoples speak the Khoe-Khwadi, Tuu, or Ju-ǂHoan languages.
Analysing the 15 published studies, the authors conclude that the ancestors of the Khoisan peoples separated from all other populations around 135,000 years ago.
When did language capacity first emerge?
All modern humans are capable of acquiring human language, and the 7,000 or so languages in the world today share striking similarities in how they are constructed phonologically, syntactically, and semantically.
The authors conclude that modern humans must have already had at least the capacity to acquire human language by the time of that initial separation by 135,000 years ago. If that weren’t the case, we would expect to find some modern human populations without language, or with some fundamentally different mode of communication.
Comment: Another unlikely alternative is that separate populations could have acquired an identical—or nearly identical—language capacity independently at different times.
Using language
Even if humans did already have the capacity to acquire human language by 135,000 years ago, it doesn’t follow that all (or even any) of them had already gone on to actually acquire human language by that time. Although the capacity was already present, humans may not have started to use that capacity until later.
The authors report that around 100,000 years ago modern humans began to engage in widespread and persistent behaviour such as using pigments, body decoration, symbolic engraving, piercing shells and creating representative objects and art. They suggest that language may have played an important role in making this behaviour possible.