seg 1: well i'm involved in other things besides
seg 2: physics in
seg 3: fact
seg 4: mostly now in other things
seg 5: one thing
seg 6: is distant relationships among human languages
seg 7: and the professional
seg 8: historical linguists
seg 9: in the us and in western europe
seg 10: mostly try to stay away from any long distance relationships
seg 11: big groupings
seg 12: groupings that go back
seg 13: a long time
seg 14: longer than the
seg 15: familiar families
seg 16: they don't like that they think it's crank
seg 17: i don't think it's crank
seg 18: and there are some brilliant linguists
seg 19: mostly russians
seg 20: who are working on that
seg 21: at
seg 22: santa fe institute and in moscow
seg 23: and i would love to see
seg 24: where that leads
seg 25: does it really lead to a single ancestor
seg 26: some
seg 27: twenty twenty five thousand years ago
seg 28: and what if we go back beyond that single ancestor
seg 29: when there was presumably a competition among many
seg 30: languages
seg 31: how far back does that go how far back does modern language go
seg 32: how many tens of thousands of years does it go back chris anderson do
seg 33: you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is murray gell
seg 34: mann well i would guess that modern language must be older
seg 35: than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in
seg 36: the soft clay in the caves
seg 37: in western europe in the aurignacian period some
seg 38: thirty five thousand years ago
seg 39: or
seg 40: earlier
seg 41: i can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language
seg 42: so i would guess
seg 43: that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further
seg 44: but that doesn't mean
seg 45: that all or many or most
seg 46: of today's attested languages
seg 47: couldn't descend perhaps
seg 48: from one that's much younger than that
seg 49: like say twenty thousand years or something of that kind it's
seg 50: what we call a bottleneck ca
seg 51: well philip anderson
seg 52: may have been right you may just know more about
seg 53: everything than
seg 54: anyone
seg 55: so it's been an honor
seg 56: thank you murray gell mann