Historical languages would not leave any traces on the brain, because languages evolve at a much faster rate than biology. We believe that language is a phenome

Historical languages would not leave any traces on the brain, because languages evolve at a much faster rate than biology. We believe that language is a phenomenon that is 60,000 to 100,000 years old, which is an evolutionary blink of an eye. This is perhaps a problem with the theory of "universal grammar", which says that language itself is an evolved instinct in the brain. When was the mass extinction of humans without universal grammar? Shouldn't we be assuming that the brain processes we use for language evolved in the slow, haphazard way that everything else evolved, and asking what else we use this instinct for besides language? Those questions I'm asking are in fact hugely controversial in linguistics, because UG has been an established theory of linguistics for decades, despite that when you take it too literally it makes no evolutionary sense, and weaker forms of it don't make enough testable predictions. On the other hand, I believe Murray Gell-Mann is beyond controversial in linguistics, as in no linguists who take themselves seriously take Gell-Mann seriously. There's no evidence to tell us whether there was one "Proto-Human" language or many, and there certainly is no data to support Gell-Mann's conjectures about specific properties of Proto-Human. It feels a bit wrong to conclude this with "argumentam ad cartoonist", but here's SMBC lampooning Gell-Mann: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic