Meat-eating early humans made a meal of their speech

ARGUMENTS over the diets of our Paleolithic ancestors have raged for decades, but one thing is now certain, if any were vegetarian, they wouldn’t have been able to say so.

Research into the jawbones and linguistic ability of Stone Age humans has found that, until the birth of farming about 10,000 years ago, adults could not pronounce the letters “v” or “f ”.

The sounds, known as fricatives and labiodentals, can only be produced when the lower lip pushes against the upper teeth to form a slight hissing sound. But the teeth of hunter-gathering humans used to meet in an edge-toedge bite due to their meaty and fibrous diet, leaving them unable to form the consonants.

It wasn’t until the dawn of agriculture, which brought softer foods like rice and bread, that humans began to retain the juvenile overbite that had previously disappeared by adulthood.

Even then it took thousands of years for the jaw to change sufficiently to allow the new sounds to form and trigger the diverse lexicons of today’s languages. “In Europe, our data suggests that the use of labiodentals has increased dramatically only in the last couple of millennia, correlated with the rise of food-processing technology such as industrial milling,” said Dr Steven Moran, from the University of Zurich which led the study with help from researchers in France, Germany and Singapore.

“The influence of biological conditions on the development of sounds has so far been underestimated.”

The team created computer simulations of changing human facial structures over thousands of years to find out what sounds each were capable of producing.

It was inspired by an observation made by the linguist Charles Hockett, who, in 1985, noticed that labiodentals such as “f ” and “v” were often found in societies with access to softer foods.

“Our results shed light on complex causal links between cultural practices, human biology and language,” project leader Prof Balthasar Bickel, said. “They also challenge the common assumption that, when it comes to language, the past sounds just like the present.” The research was published the journal Science.