Abstract:
In order to appraise the linguistic ability of fossil hominids, author have focused
on some of the morphological evidence. During the course of this research she
discovered that the literature available on the topic of "Language and Human
Evolution" is vast; many books and dissertations have been written on the
subject. In fact, Mellars (1996:387) writes, "it is tempting to suggest that
there are almost as many views of the possible origins of language as there
are linguists, psychologists and paleoanthropologists who have written on the
issue." It was impossible to exhaustively deal with all of the various evidence
and theories in such a brief paper. Author's goal was to focus on evidence for language
capacity from the vocal tract, brain, and hypoglossal canal, and then to
discuss this morphological evidence in the genera Australopithecus and
Homo.