These are some of Margaret Clegg's notes on speech and language that the BBC took from her in preparation for the recent edition of In Our Time(a Radio 4 programme hosted by Melvyn Bragg). I thought they might interest some of you.

"We do not know whether the hominids that preceded Homo sapiens had speech. The earliest solidly bipedal hominids had a vocal tract very similar to a modern human, even in terms of the position of the larynx. Chimps' vocal tracts and larynx are also very similar to that of Homo sapiens. A fossil discovery in Israel showed that Neanderthals had a hyoid bone, the bone within the vocal tract which forms the framework at the bottom of the tongue where the muscles that come down from the jaw attach the hyoid bone. This hyoid looks like modern human bone and the inference is that the Neanderthal jaw muscles were the same and would function in the same way as those of Homo sapiens. It appears that it is the configuration of our vocal tracts that gives us the space to make sounds and it seems reasonable to suppose that this was in place in early hominids. Therefore the range of sounds that Neanderthal man could make would be similar to us. However, that does not pre-suppose that Neanderthals had language.

Speech and language are two separate phenomena. Speech is related to sound and language concerns a symbolic referential system which arbitrarily associates sound with an object or idea. The development of language is linked to modern Homo sapiens in Europe about 40,000 years ago where burial grounds and art have been found which show a concept of symbolism. This makes researchers pretty certain that they also had language. However, once that assumption has been made then it becomes arbitrary as to whether any other species had language. There is no archaeological evidence to say that without doubt there was language so then we have to wonder whether Neanderthals had language or not. There are no signals or artefacts to suggest they did, but they had large brains and a more sophisticated approach to cultural life. There are examples of Neanderthal burial grounds and objects that might be art, such as an animal bone with holes in it which could have been a musical instrument (even though music does not presuppose language).

Endocasts are casts of the outside of the brain which sometimes occur naturally and can also be made by researchers, which give an idea of what the cortex would have looked like. The Neanderthal cortex would have looked similar to our own. The development of the brain is not due to growth structure but due to the co-opting of what was used for one function instead for something else. The area in our brain used for speech is close to the area used for fine hand movement. It is probable that, in the ability to speak, we lost some of our fine motor abilities.

Language is not a once and for all event and did not spring fully-formed. Instead, it would have grown out of activities like singing chords collectively as some primates do as a means of group cohesion or as a need for social grooming. With any group of primates or hominids there is the overwhelming need to keep alliances going to survive, hence the need to groom one another and to keep the endorphins going. This could be how gossip evolved. Primates communicate things vocally and visually in terms of facial expression and tone of voice and there was probably an amalgam of all sorts of abilities grafted together to build up a sort of proto-language early on. Pidgins and Creoles might be similar in terms of the simplicity of the language.

Language is a marker of group differences because to have a language involves a shared consensus of meaning. At the early evolution of language this grouping might have been a family or a slightly larger group. Some researchers have suggested that there was only one language that evolved, but if you look at chimps they have different 'accents' and a chimp that moves from one group to another will adapt to the new group accent. But this research is still very much work in progress.

It is very difficult to know where and why we got language. There are times when language is totally inadequate and facial expression shows more.

Language might have evolved as an additional way of manipulating the people around you so that you get them to do what you want. Chimps will not communicate to all in their group where the food is. They will 'tell' some chimps and not others".

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