What the 23 Oldest Spoken Words Can Tell Us about the Past
In 2013 a linguistic research team published a ground-breaking paper in which they claimed to have identified a set of words that are so ancient they are shared across many languages. You can read the academic paper describing their hypothesis and research method here in PDF format. The list of words they identified is given in this table. The “Meaning” column uses the modern English representation of the word. The next 7 column headings are language group identifiers. The “Max Cog Set” column totals the number of groups in which the word still exists. These seven groups represent the languages of Europe and Asia. The research team estimates that these words may be as much as 15,000 years old.
| MEANING | PIE(a) | PU(b) | PA(c) | PK(d) | PD(e) | PCK(f) | PIY(g) | Max Cog Set(h) |
| ashes | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| bark | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| black | 1 | 0 | 1 | ? | 1 | ? | 1 | 4 |
| fire | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| hand | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| I | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| man | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| mother | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| not | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| old | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | ? | 0 | 4 |
| that | 1 | 1 | 1 | ? | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| this | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| thou | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 |
| (to) flow | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| (to) give | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| (to) hear | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | ? | 0 | 4 |
| (to) pull | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| (to) spit | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ? | 0 | 4 |
| we | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| what | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ? | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| who | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| worm | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| ye | 0 | 1 | ? | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
The nature of the data itself reveals something quite interesting: that despite close cultural and historical ties between Europe, Asia, and Africa through the past 15,000 years we have no African languages that retain the same basic words still used by the EurAsian language groups.
The survival of these words implies that they have remained culturally important through all the millennia. We should not read into the exclusion of other words from the list that they were not important 15,000 years ago. Rather, for reasons we don’t know, some of the ancestral words evolved into different forms, creating new branch families. For example, words for “blood” exist in all these language groups but their cognates (words of similar form and meaning) are divided into two super groups of language families, rather than the one super group we have here.
Other words that fall into the two super group category include “cold”, “foot”, “small”, “feather”, “good”, “hold”, “know”, “mountain”, “night”, “salt”, “stick”, “(to) bite”, “(to) laugh”, “(to) sew”, “(to) turn”, “two”, and “wife”.
Another category of ancient words consists three or more cognate groups per word, where similar words occurred in 3 or more language groups. From this category we derive “(to) burn”, “(to) cut”, “belly”, “big”, “child”, “cloud”, “egg”, “fat”, “hair”, “narrow”, “neck”, “one”, “scratch”, “skin”, “thin”, “(to) blow”, “(to) dig”, “(to) drink”, “(to) eat”, “(to) tie”, and “year”.
From the list of 23 words we can conclude that ancient cultures were able to differentiate between things ubiquitously. They differentiated between everything, in fact. Their perception of the world was precise but relevant to what was important to them. Why would worms be so important to humans that we would retain our basic word form for 15,000 years? That question will tease scientists for millennia to come but worms are associated with agriculture, fishing, animal husbandry, and death. They remain culturally significant to us today and have evolved into metaphors and symbols that are universally recognized (including dragons).
The great proliferation of pronouns among the ancient words suggests that social groups were very important. What is missing from the two lists is a set of words designating enemies or rivals. The world was still only sparsely settled 10,000 to 15,000 years ago and the weak need for a universal set of words to denote rivals suggests that conflicts did not last very long. Groups who felt threatened or that were overpowered could simply pick up and leave. Only when mankind started building civilizations did words for enemies and “them” become important.
Action words (verbs) were also important. There is no passive verbal form in either list. Our ancestors spent their time managing fire, caring for each other, and making things. Why did the verb “(to) spit” mean so much through the ages? We use spit to confer both respect and insult but it is also a defense mechanism. If something flies into your mouth, or if you eat something that tastes bad, your mother will surely tell you to spit it out.
The differences between the sexes were important as well. Men have only one designation but women have “mother” and “wife”, with “mother” earning the most importance.
Questions were also important. Our ancestors never stopped asking “who” or “what” and from that we can infer an intellectual curiosity that gave rise to philosophy, faith, and science. We have an ancient word “not” implying a difference between something we recognize and something we don’t, and in the next wave of words we have “good” and “know”. Negation implies rejection and separation and “good” implies a recognition of things that are beneficial. “Know” implies the preservation of lessons learned, perhaps through tribal memory or totems of which we have long lost knowledge and understanding.
We found evidence of totems at Gobekli Tepe, which is about 11,000 years old. The Common Neolithic Word Set given above suggests that Anatolia was a heartland for our EurAsian ancestors. Instead of being unique Gobekli Tepe may only be the last of its kind, a communal meeting ground for ancient clans and families that shared a common culture over a widespread area.
Trees and birds were important to these people. But why did they remember the ancient word for “bark” while evolving new words for “feather” and “egg”? Could it be that metaphor was already creeping into the language 15,000 years ago? Symbolic thinking is quite ancient and is attested among human artifacts more than 100,000 years old. Our ancestors may have had the capacity for metaphor millions of years ago. We know this is possible because Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought, just as Chimpanzees have the ability to “think about thinking” today. Three species separated by vast gulfs in time are not likely to co-evolve the same capability independently of each other. They share the same genetic root capabilities.
Hence, the Neolithic EurAsian language was a late relic of symbolic thinking and metacognition. The usefulness of metaphor must therefore be very, very ancient and it may explain the evolution of language more than anything else. Each family group developed its own metaphors for reasons long forgotten and as they moved away from each other they took their metaphors with them, but they still shared the same basic needs and skills, and their social relationships were not very different from each other.
People looked up in the sky and they felt the wind blowing across their skin. They gazed upon distant mountains and they lit fires at night to stay warm. They knew what was good. Size was important to them. Families were important.
But change was also important to them. It happened all around them. Their environment was constantly changing, and that may have led to some of the conflicts that eventually gave rise to words for war and enemies. Or those concepts may already have been there, deeply embedded in human culture, but our ancestors developed different words for them before moving away from each other.
We only know of one human process that enables this kind of rapid differentiation through metaphor and construction: poetry. There is no evidence that people fifteen thousand years ago were singing songs and telling stories to each other. But we know that they differentiated between themselves and others and they they recognized old versus (not old or new), and that they paid attention to hearing. Hearing is an important skill, but so is language and the two go hand in hand.
Our Neolithic fathers laughed and laughed and knew what was good. They shared common values. How did they pass these things from generation to generation if not through song and story? The alternatives are few and thin. Human culture may have required millions or hundreds of thousands of years to create the skills necessary for tale telling and poetry but once those skills were ours we never let them rest. The lack of evidence for such things is itself a question of why there should be such evidence, for in both poetry and story-telling invention and embellishment are praiseworthy.
We must have found reasons to change our words. A better sounding word presented itself, but what were the rules for inventing new words 20,000 to 15,000 years ago? Were they so different from today? We have too few clues to solve this puzzle but the field of linguistics has provided some of the clues we have.
What we know with surety is that people living over 10,000 years ago found reasons to change their languages. The scant evidence available to us suggests there was once a common ancestral language, lost and primitive, that migrated out of Africa. There may have been contemporary languages that died out but one spread far enough to give birth to hundreds of modern languages.
That tells us that at one time our ancestors were close enough to depend on each other, to care about each other, and to need each other. They lived normal lives, fulfilling daily needs, and yet found time to think about the abstract and the profound. That is a lesson well worth learning from the past.