Inferring further back: The first language

A. The Khoi-San languages, in this light, may shed more light on the human past. There are about 50 of these languages, but they do not form a tidy group as, for example, Indo-European does. There is barely a typical “Khoi-San” grammar—some bristle with case endings like Latin, while others are more “naked” like Chinese, and there are not many words that appear in similar guises in all or even many of them. This suggests that these languages are quite ancient, having diverged over a vast amount of time. In addition, the two click languages in Tanzania are extremely different from the ones spoken in the south, as well as from one another.

B. In this light, it is important that humans emerged in Africa, that early Homo sapiens fossils are smaller than today’s humans (Bushmen are rather small people), and that it is very hard to conceive of how clicks could emerge in a language. It may be that the clicks were present in the first language(s) and have disappeared almost everywhere but where they originally existed.

C. Thus, the click languages may be the descendants of the first one.