We're talking about ancient human hearing!
We're talking!!
oh forget it.
listeners and friends We've spent a lot of time on DNews talking
about language and the power of spitting flow atcha, but no matter how sick your flow, if
we hadn't evolved hearing, it would be lost on you.
Hearing is one of our essential traits, and according to a study from a Jan 2006 issue
of Nature we got our auditory adroitness from fish gills!
Our ears have tiny bones which translate waves of energy pushing through the air from wave
energy to mechanical energy, then fluid energy, before conversion to chemical signals for
processing in the brain.
But, 370 million years ago, a fish called Eusthenopteron [Yoos-then-opter-on], had a
small bone which had a kink that blocked the gill opening, and its descendant, Panderichthys
[Pander-ick-this] had a slightly wider version of that bone, called a spiracle.
Spiracles allow the fish to breathe air above the surface while it remains underwater (which
in itself is incredible), but scientists think the spiracle is the missing link between fish
gills and land-animal hearing!
There are, of course, a number of evolutionary steps in-between; for example, the hyomandibular
[hi-oh-mandib-u-lar] bone which became the stapes -- a stirrup-shaped bone in the middle
ear -- evolved from a bone that used to brace the lower jaw of sharks and early jawed fishes.
Because of these tiny bones and slow adaptations, we slowly adapted our own hearing.
According to an old study from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: generally
speaking, mammals have larger audible fields than birds and reptiles, mostly because of
our ability to hear higher frequencies thanks to adaptations of the middle ear around 40
million years ago in the Eocene era.
Human hearing isn't the best in the natural world, but it's not the worst either.
Thanks to our close-set ears, we can hear high-frequency sounds; a great adaptation
for hearing brief high-frequency noises -- like the rustles made by predators in the woods.
Just a guess.
As time wore on we eventually got to the 2.1-million-year-old Australopithecus Africanus, an ancient human
ancestor.
This hominin had an earlier version of our hearing systems, and a new study in September
2015's Science Advances, scanned the skulls of this and Paranthropus robustus and used
the scans to reconstruct a computer model of early human ears.
Turns out, Australopithecus' and Paranthropus' physiologies allowed them to hear very differently
than modern humans.
Back then, we were more sensitive to Ts, Ks, Fs and Ss in the 1 to 3 kHz range, because
savannahs don't have things for sound to bounce off of!
The researchers think they would have been able to hear these hard consonant sounds short-range
across open areas, which makes sense because these ancient humans were all about that savannah
life.
On top of that, Australopithecus and Paranthropus were better at 1-3kHz than we humans OR our
primate cousins are now.
By comparison, today, modern humans speak in the 1kHz to 6kHz range, something these
ancient humans wouldn't have been good at at all.
A 2011 study in the journal Science, used a mathematical model to trace DNA evidence
of human migration and language development, and found verbal communication did likely
originate in Africa; probably in the form of click language.
Hard consonant languages could be 100,000 years old!
What if, as we left the forests and savannahs of Africa, our hearing changed too, and we
evolved language to match that evolution!
That would explain why we speak in that 1-6 range today, but these ancient people use
the click languages and spoke in hard consonants, because it was easier to hear.
Science is still trying to figure this out, but what do you think?