The Human Edge From Primitive Parts, A Highly Evolved Human Brain But we can see what the human vocal tract shape has allowed us to do that our primate relatives can't. Fossils can only tell us so much about the shape of the vocal tract because much of it is soft tissue. These changes didn't evolve overnight, but it's hard to pinpoint when we moved beyond primitive grunts and started talking. So we evolved this crazy airway that allows us to choke to death more efficiently - all to further our ability to make more sounds and speak. "The downside of this was that because you're pulling the larynx all the way down, when you eat, all the food has to go past the larynx - and miss it - and get into the esophagus," Lieberman says. "The first time we see human skulls - fossils - that have everything in place is about 50,000 years ago where the neck is long enough, the mouth is short enough, that they could have had a vocal tract like us," he says.īut with these important changes came a new risk. The reason the neck started getting longer, Lieberman says, is that the tongue moved down, pulling the larynx lower, requiring more room for it all in the neck. We developed a more flexible tongue that could be controlled more precisely, and a longer neck. ![]() Over 100,000 years ago, the human mouth started getting smaller and protruding less. Lieberman says that, looking back at human evolution, it's evident that after humans diverged from an early ape ancestor, the shape of the vocal tract changed. Philip Lieberman, a professor of cognitive and linguistic science at Brown University who has studied the evolution of speech for more than five decades. It takes about 10 years for children to get to the adult levels," says Dr. "Speech, by the way, is the most complex motor activity that any person acquires - except maybe violinists or acrobats. In a split second, Wilson can go from his talking voice to full vibrato, enunciating each sound with graceful clarity as his voice fills the room. He has toured the world singing and now teaches at the University of Maryland at College Park and at Towson University. Humans have flexibility in the mouth, tongue and lips that lets us form a wide range of precise sounds that chimps simply can't produce, and some have developed this complex voice instrument more than others. That is because over thousands of years, humans have evolved a longer throat and smaller mouth better suited for shaping sound. But we're the ones singing opera and talking on the phone. To make these sounds - and talk - humans use the same basic apparatus that chimps have: lungs, throat, voice box, tongue and lips. Not only do humans have evolved brains that process and produce language and syntax, but we also can make a range of sounds and tones that we use to form hundreds of thousands of words. Most of us do it every day without even thinking about it, yet talking is a uniquely human ability. According to fossils, the first humans who had an anatomy capable of speech patterns appeared about 50,000 years ago. As humans evolved, our throats got longer and our mouths got smaller - physiological changes that enabled us to effectively shape and control sound.
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