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The Origins of Language Earliest Origins Until the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment (a European intellectual movement), most thinking about the origin of language had assumed it began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The most recent theory of the origin of language is that simple hand gestures were used as long ago as six or seven million years, shortly after the first humans diverged from the apes. Shouting would have been used as alarm calls or emotional outbursts. About five million years ago, an early hominid, started to walk upright, and a more complex form of gesturing was probably used. Then, two million years ago the brain size increased and hand gestures were used in various combinations as the primary means of communication. As recently as 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens may have changed the main means of communication from hand and facial gestures to vocal-isations and the use of differing sounds to convey meanings. Gradually the use of gesturing diminished, although we still use it today to emphasise speech, even during telephone conversations, when the person at the other end cannot see the gestures.

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The Book of Origins is for people who want to know how and when things began, where they came from, and why they started.

For instance, the telephone was invented in 1876 by Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) at the age of 29. He had succeeded in transmitting speech sounds the year before.

Elisha Gray (1835-1901) also invented the telephone in 1876, but Bell beat him to the Patent Office by just a few hours. A major court battle followed which went in favour of Bell. Unlike Bell, Gray had produced a working prototype in 1874, but neglected to patent it.

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Trevor Homer is our guest blogger during the week of July 16th. If you have any questions for Trevor Homer, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about The Book of Origins:

Everything—from the mundane (the pencil) to the catastrophic (the atom bomb)—has an origin, but often it’s not what we expect. A few things you may not have known

• Gandhi was married at age thirteen!
• Chinese fortune cookies are an American invention and were not eaten in China until the 1990s when they were advertised as “Genuine American Fortune Cookies.”
• Bayer lost the trademark for aspirin (which they had held since 1897) as part of the reparations Germany was forced to pay after World War I.
• The original idea for the electric chair came from an American dentist.

For aspiring mindblowers and wanna-be know-it-alls, The Book of Origins is a treasure trove of trivia and fascinating facts guaranteed to entertain and enlighten.

About Trevor Homer

Trevor Homer was born and educated in the Black Country and is a former British Amateur Champion golfer. He represented England seventeen times, winning the European Team Championship in 1973, and Great Britain and Northern Ireland eleven times.