Today’s New York Times has an interesting article about the origins of language:
“Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.”
The article has a very informative map showing how the number of phonemes decreases the further away a language is from southern Africa.
What I especially liked about the article is how careful Atkinson is in explaining how his findings only suggest that his hypothesis is true, avoiding causal claims. I wish more science reporting would emphasize this.