…words and other language units change systematically as they are passed from one generation to the next, much the way genes do. Charles Darwin similarly argued in 1871 that languages, like biological species, have evolved into a series of related forms….

…In a controversial paper in the April 15 Science, Atkinson concluded that because African languages have greater numbers of speech sounds than others, language probably originated in Africa. A parallel argument from evolutionary biology holds that greater numbers of DNA alterations in African populations reflect humankind’s African roots….