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The gab gift of humanity is not fixed, and agriculture could help explain why.
In the last 6,000 or so years, agricultural societies have increasingly substituted dairy and processed grain products for the more difficult chewing and wild-type meat that is more common in hunter-gatherer diets. Scientists say that switching to softer and more processed diets has altered the structure of people's jaws, making certain sounds such as "f" and "v" and changing languages around the world.
People who regularly chew on tough foods, such as game meat, undergo a jaw change that eliminates a mild overbite of childhood. But adults who grow up eating softer foods maintain this superconfidence in adulthood, says comparator linguist Damián Blasi of the University of Zurich and his colleagues. Computer simulations suggest that adults with an overbite are better able to produce certain sounds that require touching the lower lip compared to the upper teeth, report researchers in March 15 Science.
Linguists classify these speech sounds, found in about half of the world's languages, as labiodentals. And when Blasi and his team reconstituted the language change over time between Indo-European languages (SN: 25/11/17, p. 16), currently being talked about from Iceland to India, the researchers found that the likelihood of using labiodentals in these languages had increased significantly over the past 6,000 to 7,000 years. This is especially true when foods such as ground cereals and dairy products have begun to appear (SN: 2/1/03, p. 67).
"Labiodental sounds have recently appeared in our species and appear more frequently in populations with long traditions of soft food consumption," Blasi said at a news conference held on March 12.
The Yale University linguist, Claire Bowern, who did not participate in the new study, shares this view. If some sounds become easier to pronounce, the likelihood of these sounds appearing in the words increases. But changes in the way words are actually pronounced may still not happen, says Bowern. Evidence of the rapid incorporation of labiodentals into many languages is therefore surprising, she says.
Linguists have always thought that humans are still able to produce all the sounds used in the 7,000 or so languages still spoken today. Crucial elements of speech anatomy, such as a larynx or voice box, placed low in the neck, have evolved toward Homo species 500,000 years ago. Homo sapiens thus emerged about 300,000 years ago, biologically prepared to speak.
Then, in 1985, linguist Charles Hockett stated that hunter-gatherer languages almost never include labiodental sounds. This is because, early in adulthood, high tooth wear caused by intense chewing of difficult foods causes dental changes that move the upper teeth directly to the lower teeth, he said. . A resulting "edge-to-edge" tooth arrangement makes it harder to form laboratory sounds, Hockett explained. If true, his proposal meant that the introduction of soft foods in agricultural societies should have protected excess bites and increased the likelihood that spoken languages include labiodentals.
The computer simulations of the new study support Hockett's idea. They show that a transition from one bite at a time to a slight overbite significantly facilitates the emission of labiodental sounds.
In addition, a statistical analysis of the languages and lifestyles of over 2400 populations around the world revealed that on average, hunter-gatherers use about a labiodental sound in their speech for four people spoken by people in companies that produce and process food. A closer look at hunter-gatherer languages in Greenland, southern Africa and Australia revealed few cases of labiodental sounds. Historical records indicate that words with labiodental sounds have been borrowed from contacts with people in industrialized countries, the researchers say.
According to some evolutionary biologists, Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in England, the tendency of some currently poorly pronounced sounds to become more widely used can help explain the rapid incorporation of labiodentals into many languages. If labiodentals became easier to pronounce relatively recently, which made them more likely to be pronounced by chance, these sounds would have quickly been incorporated into many native languages, he speculates.
Although the new discoveries are "fundamentally correct," human overblanking grew much more after the industrial revolution, which began in England in the late 1700s, that after the introduction of agri-food products there is 6,000 years old or older, says biological anthropologist Robert Corruccini of southern Illinois. Carbondale University.
The industrialization of food processing and canning – and perhaps the adoption of forks in Western societies, so that they can cut food with both hands rather than in them. grabbing with one hand while grabbing a portion with the front teeth – played an important role in preserving the suprations, argues.
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