"If modern humans left Africa 185,000 years ago or more, why does the oldest language in India date back less than 3% of that time?How old is the oldest human language? It’s tough to say. Using linguistic analysis and statistics, scientists from the Max Planck Institute have estimated the date of the Dravidian family of languages on the southern parts of India at 4,500 years old. Phys.org reports that Dravidians were present a thousand years before Indo-Aryans arrived in India. 80 derived dialects of the ancient language family are still spoken today by some 220 million people.
“The study of the Dravidian languages is crucial for understanding prehistory in Eurasia, as they played a significant role in influencing other language groups,” explains corresponding author Annemarie Verkerk of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Neither the geographical origin of the Dravidian language nor its exact dispersal through time is known with certainty. The consensus of the research community is that the Dravidians are natives of the Indian subcontinent and were present prior to the arrival of the Indo-Aryans (Indo-European speakers) in India around 3,500 years ago. It is likely that the Dravidian languages were much more widespread to the west in the past than they are today.The estimate appears to be on the high side, pushing back the language earlier than previously thought, but not more than 4,500 years in total.
The researchers used advanced statistical methods to infer the age and subgrouping of the Dravidian language family at about 4,000-4,500 years old. This estimate, while in line with suggestions from previous linguistic studies, is a more robust result because it was found consistently in the majority of the different statistical models of evolution tested in this study. This age also matches well with inferences from archaeology, which have previously placed the diversification of Dravidian into North, Central, and South branches at exactly this age, coinciding with the beginnings of cultural developments evident in the archaeological record.
On the one hand, they wish to think that our equals ‘evolved’ over 300,000 years ago, and soon after that migrated into Europe and Asia. Also, when they got there, they had no trouble interbreeding with the Neanderthals. But then, at the other extreme, one of the oldest language groups dates back no more than 4,500 years ago. What did people like us do for 295,000 years? What did they say to one another? Why didn’t they build permanent cities? Did they really live in caves all that time? Why is the first civilization so late in arriving?
Language “evolves” by intelligent design, not by natural selection. Once endowed with a common language, people can decide what they want certain words to mean, and what grammatical rules they want to modify for convenience, or to fit new situations. By habit, separate groups will develop dialects, which will diverge further over time. That’s what happened in American English in just a few centuries. Today’s various Dravidian languages and dialects continue to point back to that original grouping that settled in the area long ago after Babel." CEH
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language,...
Genesis 11:7
