ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a hypothesis that claims that the human language faculty as a genetic endowment emerged much earlier than has often been assumed: at the latest, 1301-50 thousand years ago. It uses the two basic assumptions/frameworks to address the problems of the origins and evolution of human language. First, it assume the single origin hypothesis of Homo sapiens and assume that anatomically modern humans first appeared in East Africa around 200 kya. Second, the hypothesis will be developed within the framework of the recent minimalist program of generative grammar. The chapter presents the pieces of archaeological/paleoanthropological evidence in favor of this claim and then present and discusses two pieces of genetic evidence that support it. Taken together, these pieces of recent archaeological/paleoanthropological evidence lead us to conclude that anatomically modern Homo sapiens left Africa through the southern route, not as recently as 5080 kya but at the latest around 130 kya.
