Can you proofread and offer suggestions to my essay? Thank you very much!
The prompt is:
What kinds of evidence have been examined to try to determine the time of origin of modern human language? What answer to this question do these suggest?
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As a French student in an American university, who seeks to ameliorate his employability on the global job market, I have been fully aware of the importance of the communication. My mother tongue, French, and its cousin's tongue, English, have never kept demonstrating the splendid intricacy of both their divergences and their similarity. Moreover, beyond the conspicuous difference of their vocabulary and grammar, those languages have epitomized the variations between the Anglo-Saxon and French cultures. A subfield of anthropology, called linguistics, focuses on the study of the distinctions of contemporaneous languages through ethnosemantics, which scrutinizes the meanings of the words in relation to folk taxonomies, or sociolinguistics, which examines the languages in their social context. However, other scientists are more inclined to trace the origins of the human language as a whole back to the emergence of communication by means of shared symbols. Those historical linguists search for bio-cultural evidence to determine the time of origin of modern human language.
Biological evidence mainly stems from works in the discipline of paleo-anthropometry. First, physical anthropologists highlight changes into the trachea, such as a lowering of the epiglottis and the larynx plus an elongation of the pharynx and a modification of the soft palate. Those transformations have entailed a complete alteration of the passage of the air through the trachea. In addition, they have permitted our early ancestors not only to control the expulsion and aspiration of the air through the trachea to produce sounds but also to vary the pressure with their tongue, palate, and lips. Those elements give an insight into the physiological capacity of our ancestors to produce elaborate sounds that are primordial for an evolution into modern human languages.
Besides, although an appropriate vocal apparatus is indispensable for modern human languages, it is nevertheless insufficient because our ancestors have also needed brains, in the literal as well as the figurative sense. The anthropologists have endeavoured to discover thanks to endocasts, natural or human-made reproductions of the inside of skulls, whether our ancestors had the faculty to utilize a vocal communication. They should have a sufficiently large cranial capacity and areas associated with the same psychomotor functions that are present in modern humans' brains. Indeed, to administrate an efficient vocal apparatus, their brains have had to be asymmetrical, which is a key structural factor in modern human brains, and with language-associated areas. Such physiological information, although it is highly valuable to understand the origin of the modern human language, requires to be nonetheless compared with current primates to identify up to what extent our ancestors have been closer to contemporary human or nonhuman primates, and thus recognize whether they could have employed a modern human language.
Cultural evidence essentially originates from archaeology, historical linguistics, and cultural anthropology. First, an effective means to reveal our ancestors' knowledge of a modern human language lies in the recuperation of written records during archaeological excavations. However, those documents have to be accurately dated to confirm their period of origin. Moreover, even if the dates are correct, the sole confirmation that can be asserted is that humans utilized a modern language as far back as that period. That language may have been in use far before that period but that it may have only been spoken. Consequently, although those kinds of clues are precious, they are not reliable sources as regards the earliest utilisation of a modern human language.
Subsequently, thanks to the methods of historical linguistics, researchers probe into contemporaneous and extinct languages to unveil common descents and thus trace the origin of modern human languages back to the most plausible appearance in terms of locations and dates. However, those scientists must be vigilant because similar words in different languages may be cognates, namely they share an identical descent, but they may also be directly borrowed in another language in recent times. For example, English and French lexica seem similar enough to establish a recent common origin whereas their actual common source is extremely distant.
Then, another point must be addressed, although it is often eluded, because of its so obvious necessity. Anthropologists shed light on aspects that are quite perplexing: when did our ancestors accumulate enough cultural traits to feel the need to transmit their knowledge through a means of communication as complex as a modern human language? That raises the issue of the necessity to communicate about things and ideas that are remote in space or time. Our ancestors have required that capacity, known as displacement, as soon as their vocalizations and gestures proved to be inadequate to rapidly and precisely convey complex meanings and descriptions. Moreover, displacement necessitates an evolution into an open symbolic language, that is to say they have developed the aptitude to generate unlimited numbers of meanings, called productivity. Furthermore, the exploitation of such a language demanded to be able to use concrete but also abstract significations.
Finally, the hominids' psychomotor and conceptual aptitudes are extremely complicated to trace back because of the total absence of proper historical records. Consequently, the anthropologists have to adopt a scientific method as holistic as possible to avoid ignoring biological or cultural hints that could help them to unveil the enigma of the modern human languages. Furthermore, the emergence of modern human languages underlines how momentous the hominids' biological and cultural evolutions are. Above all, such an adaptive strategy emphasizes the brilliance of the humans' adaptability to implement successful survival mechanisms and thus postpone our species' extinction. To some extent, as a French student in an American university, who seeks to ameliorate his employability on the global job market, I have been employing that adaptive strategy to aggrandize, thanks to my common law wife, our reproductive success. Consequently, the direct and side effects of education spread far beyond their traditional applications.