55. Period of the Origin of Language
Is, then, human language as old as culture? It is difficult to be positive, because words perish like beliefs and institutions, whereas stone tools endure as direct evidence. On the whole, however, it would appear that the first rudiments of what deserves to be called language are about as ancient as the first culture manifestations, not only because of the theoretically close association of the two phases, but in the light of circumstantial testimony, namely the skull interiors of fossil men. In Piltdown as well as Neandertal man, those brain cortex areas in which the nervous activities connected with auditory and motor speech are most centralized in modern man, are fairly well developed, as shown by casts of the skull interiors, which conform closely to the brain surface. The general frontal region, the largest area of the cortex believed to be devoted to associative functions—in loose parlance, to thought—is also greater than in any known ape. More than one authority has therefore felt justified in attributing speech to the ancestors of man that lived well back in the Pleistocene. The lower jaws of Piltdown and in a measure of Heidelberg man, it is true, are narrow and chinless, thus leaving somewhat less free play to the tongue than living human races enjoy. But this factor is probably of less importance than the one of mental facultative development. The parrot is lipless and yet can reproduce the sounds of human speech. What he lacks is language faculty; and this, it seems, fossil man already had in some measure.