The languages that cannot be found

To quote Donald Rumsfeld in a context entirely unrelated to current events, the history of human languages includes some “known knowns”. Researchers know a fair bit about the Indo-European languages because there’s a lot of evidence available from members of this family, including ancient languages like Hittite, Sanskrit and Greek that were spoken at a time not too far removed from the common ancestor. On the other hand, reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic — the ancestor of Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, and others like Ancient Egyptian — is a fraught affair because of the sheer depth of time. It may have been spoken as far back as 16,000 BCE, far earlier than even its earliest recorded descendents. What is possible to know about it is limited.

If one tries to go even further back, very little can be said — was there a “Proto-World”, spoken by a single human population, from which all later languages descend? Maybe, maybe not. But in evolutionary terms, there must have been a point when the capacity for language developed. A paper published in Frontiers in Psychology attempts to set a lower bound for this. It uses genomic studies to pinpoint the earliest divergence in modern human populations, between the Khoisan people of southern Africa and the rest. Since all human populations today, including the Khoisan, have language, the capacity must have existed before this divergence, at least 1,35,000 years ago.

Linguistic capacity doesn’t necessarily mean language — it has been suggested that, at first, there was a system internal to the mind, externalised for communication only later. But whenever they developed, the earliest individual languages have been lost to the abyss of time. They are not simply “known unknowns” but known unknowables.