What do cavemen do

So, we face a big problem. The objective of this article is to show how linguists have still managed to figure out many things about the languages from prehistory. To achieve this knowledge, linguists have relied mostly but not only on the properties of present-day human languages, which they know very well.

You have probably realized that languages change over time. They change slowly and subtly, but you may have noticed some of these changes. Your parents may use some old-fashioned words that you and your friends would never use. For example, if you want to say that something is really good, you may say dope or phat.

Instead, your parents may say awesome or wicked … and your grandparents, groovy or hip! However, it is not only the vocabulary that changes over time.

All aspects of a language, from sounds, to grammar, to how words and sentences are used during conversation, change with time. If you have, you will have found many strange words and phrases.

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. What light through yonder window breaks? Also, in present-day English, soft is an adjective and not a verb.

If you go back in time even more, English starts to sound really strange. You may know the Our Father , one of the most famous Christian prayers. Actually, the tenth-century phrase above sounds more like German than like English.

This is why many German words are familiar to the English ear. Germans say Vater instead of father , and himmel instead of heaven. On the contrary, people speaking Romance languages like Spanish , use words much less familiar to the speakers of English, like padre and cielo , respectively.

And if we compare sister languages like English and German, we can go back even further, to the time when the mother language called Proto-German was spoken and neither English nor German existed yet. Over the years, linguists have learned that language changes take time and follow general rules to learn more, read [ 1 ]. Using this knowledge, linguists can compare pairs of words with similar sounds and the same meanings in related languages, like German and English, and then infer how these words would have sounded some hundreds or even thousands of years ago in Proto-German.

If you think about it, this is some sort of time travel after all … without a time machine! Linguists have discovered that most European languages like English and German, but also like Russian, Spanish, and Greek, are sister languages and belong to the same big family of languages, the Indo-European group Figure 1.

It is called Proto-Indo-European and was spoken nearly 5, years ago! Unfortunately, the method is not perfect. Language change is not constant over time. For example, present-day Icelanders are able to read many of the Viking stories from the tenth century. The reason they can do this is that Icelandic has changed very slowly, compared with English, because Iceland is an isolated country. Another difficulty faced by linguists is that languages also change by borrowing words and sounds from other, unrelated languages.

For example, notice that the English word pork is more similar to Portuguese porco , Romanian porc , or Spanish puerco , than it is to the German word for pork, Schwein. This seems strange because, as noted earlier, English is more closely related to German than to romance languages like Portuguese, Romanian, or Spanish. Bark was woven into baskets, stripped and braided into rope, burned as fuel, stuffed in empty spaces for insulation and consumed as medicine.

This happens today, too. Beautification Syndrome In the movies, cavemen do a whole lot of grunting and pointing. More from Smithsonian. We evolved to be physically active, but we also evolved to be lazy," said Lieberman, who discussed the consequences of living with a Stone Age body in a Space Age world. During the talk, Lieberman described some of the ways that instincts humans inherited from the Stone Age — also known as the Paleolithic Period, stretching from between 2.

Humans crave high-energy foods, like fats and carbohydrates, because such food was hard to come by in the Stone Age, but can now be consumed in great abundance to the detriment of the body.

Meanwhile, humans typically opt out of energy-intensive habits, such as walking to destinations, because people also inherited brains hardwired to want to save energy. Here are five day-to-day decisions modern humans face that are made complicated by their Stone Age bodies:. The sight of a flight of stairs next to an escalator probably strikes up a similar internal dialogue within most people.

Although, I could probably use the exerci … no, I'll take the escalator. One study that measured the percentage of people in the United States who chose stairs over escalators when both were available side by side found that only 3 percent chose the stairs, Lieberman said.

But a habit that modern people might view as lazy would have been considered smart by humanity's ancestors: Hunting and gathering was energy-intensive, and short breaks of inactivity offered the rare chance to save hard-earned calories. Many millennia before women were even allowed to compete in the Olympics, Stone Age women were as strong as modern athletes.

Life and activity of prehistoric people in the Stone Age. In Scotland, the Cairngorms are a popular weekend spot for hikers and holiday-makers. When the climate changed dramatically 11, years ago, hunter-gatherers in what is today northeastern England were forced to make substantial changes to fight off biting cold. Even as temperatures plummeted, researchers found , pioneering early people changed their way of life rather than moving elsewhere, including how they built their homes and the kind of tools that they used.

A snack eaten 14, years ago might not look so different than a modern one, after all. In northern Jordan, archaeologists found the remnants of ancient flatbread in what was once a fireplace.