Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2021 number 3

The "proto-language gap" is understood as a long interval between the time of full-fledged languages formation (with syntax and grammar, presumably to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic cultural progress 50-40 kya) and the first written texts that reliably record the most ancient states of languages. A lot of research is devoted to glottogenesis. Reconstructions of the so-called "proto-languages" (Proto-Indo-European one, Nostratic ones, etc.) are still popular in macrocomparative linguistics. The «proto-language gap» itself which is left without scientific attention needs to be overcome, and the article is devoted to sketchy bridging between glottogenesis interpreted as a multi-stage evolutionary process and the main features of known languages (number, complexity, types, universals). Concepts about bottlenecks are considered, in particular about the effects of the "volcanic winter" after the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Toba. After depopulation and strict selection a demographic growth began, and several populations of early Sapiens migrated from Africa to Eurasia. The data of paleoclimatology, paleogenetics and related disciplines are used as indirect evidence. Relevant views are linked to knowledge of hunter-gatherer groups and alliances as linguistic communities. Taking into account the processes of demographic growth, settlement and patterns of political evolution (with the enlargement of communities from alliances and chiefdoms to proto-states, states and empires) makes it possible to build versions of the likely dynamics of the language development in this significant period of prehistory.