Note 1852 — Chapter VI · (continued 3)

It has been a question whether the palæolithic man talked, and it has been asserted and denied, from the character of certain inferior maxillary bones found in caves, that he had the power of articulate speech. Dr. Brinton has recently, from an examination of the lowest stocks of linguistic utterances now known, endeavored to set forth “a somewhat correct conception of what was the character of the rudimentary utterances of the race.” Cf. Brinton, Language of the Palæolithic Man, Philadelphia, 1888; Mortillet, La préhistorique Antiquité de l’Homme (Paris, 1883); H. Steinthal, Der Ursprung der Sprache (Berlin, 1888). Horatio Hale, on “The origin of languages and the antiquity of speaking man,” in the Am. Assoc. Adv. Sci. Proc., xxxv. 279, cites the views of some physiologists to show that the pre-glacial man could not talk, because there are only rudimentary signs of the presence of important vocal muscles to be discovered in the most ancient jaw-bones which have been found. Rau inferred that the totally diverse character, as he thought, of the American tongues indicated strongly that the earliest man could not articulate (Contrib. to N. A. Ethnology, v. 92). For other somewhat wild speculations, see Col. E. Carette’s Etude sur les temps antéhistoriques, La Langage (Paris, 1878).