Origin of Languages.

This article focuses on a study conducted by Johanna Nichols, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, on the origin of languages. The results suggest that languages arose long before modern humans spread out around the globe, while they were still inhabiting the tropical regions of Asia, Africa and the Near East. Nichols, who reported her findings in a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, estimated the ages of modern languages on the basis of grammatical comparisons of certain features in language that change little over time. Her conclusions concerning the age of New World languages support recent genetic evidence that native populations in the Westem Hemisphere are much older than generally assumed.