There’s a fun article at Aeon examining whether Homo erectus spoke:
The genus Homo rules the Earth because it possesses language. But how and when did we build this kingdom of speech? And who is ‘we’? After all, Homo sapiens is just one of several species of humans that have walked the Earth. Does ‘we’ refer to our genus, Homo, or to our species, sapiens?
To discover the answers to these questions, we need to travel back in time at least 1.9 million years ago to the birth of Homo erectus, as they emerged from the ancient process of primate evolution. Erectus had nearly double the brain size of any previous hominin, walked habitually upright, were superb hunters, travelled the world, and sailed to ocean islands. And somewhere along the way they got language. Yes, erectus. Not Neanderthals. Not sapiens. And if erectus invented language, this means that Neanderthals, born more than a million years later, entered a world already linguistic.
I wish there were more rigorous definitions of genus and species. The prevailing general definition of species is a group of organisms that can interbreed and the offspring be fertile. What then to make of the statement that humans (Homo sapiens) interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans? Either they were all subspecies of the same species and the correct designation of Neanderthal would be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens or the definition of species is wrong (or there’s some undiscovered predecessor species that had the characteristics common to all three).
My opinion is that we, Neanderthal, the Denisovans, and probably erectus were all members of the same species. I would change Plato’s academy’s definition of human being to “furless featherless biped with flat nails that speaks“.
Eh? Twenty years ago, when I was a grad student in anthropology, the notion that anatomically modern humans were H.s. sapiens, and Neandertals were H.s. neanderthalensis was pretty common — not exactly presented as Scientific Fact, but as Very Likely. I don’t think things have changed.
But in speech … We can argue, and some folks do, that our early ancestors, as far back as three or four million years ago, were highly vocal and that meanings or at least emotions could be linked to specific vocalizations and that was “language” or at least the start of language, But cats do as much of that Australopithecus probably did.
In opposition to this, Noam Chomsky and his followers would seem to be arguing that genuine human speech, rich and complex and self-referential and capable of abstraction, began later — an undefined period later — and blossomed virtually instantaneously from groans and moans and grunts into the sort of thing that we would instantly recognize as language. Which strikes me as so much b—s—, but as the internet would have it, IAMAL, I Am Not A Linguist.
However, I will note that in the vicinity of 350,000 years ago, human evolution did lurch forward from the likes of Java Man and Pithecanthropus — Homo erectus and his family — to the sort of critter we now label as Homo sapiens. Heidelberg Man, for example, and later Neandertals and ourselves. These creatures had brains 50% larger than their predecessors, they made more elaborate tools, they seem to have had social rites of sorts, they occasionally provided grace goods to their dead, they wore clothes and adorned themselves with ochre, and so on and so on and so on. It would not be outlandish to guess that they had language, or at least something much much closer to modern speech than the different meows of a cat. It would not be unreasonable to link these new behaviors together with language and to suggest that both are linked to that extraordinary burgeoning of brain. (I can imagine different schools arguing about whether brains or language came first, but that’s a side matter.)
That’s long been my notion, anyhow. It seems to fit the facts we observe, But for some unclear reason, it’s a heterodox idea.
It’s wasted effort, really, to worry too much about distinctions between genera and species. That classification system was conceived a century before Darwinian evolution was formulated, a century and a half before we began to understand genetics, at a time when different kinds of organisms were thought to created specifically by God, to be unchanged from start to extinction.
Ideas have changed. And while we still speak of genus, of species, of race, of sub-race, etc., and generally know what we mean and agree with each other about our classifications, occasionally these categories overlap or become blurred.
To give one example, two hundred years back, it was common to refer to dark skinned people in America as “Africans” Over time, such people have borne such labels as “Niggers,” “Colored People”, “Negros”, “Afro-Americans,” “Blacks” and and “People of Color.” We often note that these people dwell amidst, among others, “Whites.” Many people treat these labels as VERY SERIOUS business. It’s often argued that American law or custom demands that anyone with a trace of black ancestry — “one drop of blood” — be treated by law and society as completely black, and that refusal to accept this rule should merit exceptionable punishment. People with similar attitudes once carefully defined “Octoroons” and “Quadroons”, who were sometimes treated as being rare and exotic human species. Oddly enough. even when these terms were in common use few if any American blacks had no trace of White ancestry, and anymore few whites have no trace of Black or American Indian ancestry. I note this is still an emotional issue.
For a second example, it appears that in the north eastern portion of the US, dogs and wolves and coyotes have interbred frequently enough to create a form of canine with characteristic of all three groups. It’s not a thing any biologists expected fifty years ago.
Anyhow.
What is obvious to you and me, that we and Neanderthal are both members of subspecies of the same species is, apparently, controversial. The conventional designation is that we are Homo sapiens and they are Homo neanderthalensis, i.e. two different species. The usual retort to the now-accepted interbreeding is that the definition of species needs to be changed.
I don’t know if you ever watched the genealogy program, Who Do You Think You Are? but once, in tracing the ancestry of a black professional football player, they determined he was between a quarter and three-eights of European descent, he was absolutely floored. He couldn’t believe he was part white. The genealogists remarked that he probably had the highest percentage of African ancestry of anyone they’d ever had tested.
There’s a TV spot for Ancestry.com that always makes me and my wife laugh. In it a woman is surprised to learn that she had Native American ancestry, proclaiming “I always thought we were Mexican!” Who does she think that most Mexicans are?
IMO most of the primarily white Southerners who proudly proclaim Cherokee ancestry actually have a small amount of black ancestry. As you note, it continues to be a sensitive matter.