Clicking linked to birth of language

Echoes of the earliest language spoken by ancient humans tens of thousands of years ago have been preserved in the distinctive clicking sounds still spoken by some African tribes, scientists say.

The clicks made by the San people of southern Africa and the Hadzabe of East Africa are the linguistic equivalent of living fossils, preserved from a much older and more primitive tongue probably spoken by most of the humans who lived more than 40,000 years ago.

A study by geneticists and linguists has found that people who use click sounds as part of their vocabulary have almost certainly inherited them from a common ancestor who spoke one of the earliest proto-languages.

The investigation, led by Joanna Mountain and Alec Knight of Stanford University in California, centred on the genetic relationship between the Hadzabe of north-central Tanzania and the Ju'hoansi San - also known as the !Kung - who live on the Namibia-Botswana border.

Although separated by thousands of miles, both groups use the same sort of click sounds and accompanying consonants to communicate, yet their DNA shows they are unrelated and must have been geographically separated for at least 40,000 years.

More than 30 languages in southern Africa are characterised by a repertoire of click consonants and a few are also known in East Africa.

For decades, linguists have assumed that the click languages were all related and must have derived from a common source relatively recently.

Yet the latest study shows that the click speakers in East Africa have had no discernible contact with those in southern Africa for tens of thousand of years.

- INDEPENDENT