This week’s Talk the Talk podcast is a corker. Ben and I talk about a new piece of research that traces human language all the way back to Africa. Usually, historical linguists reconstruct languages using words. This one examines the numbers of phonemes. If the serial founder effect works for languages like it does for biology, we should expect to see languages use a lot of sounds when they’re close to language’s place of origin, and fewer sounds in languages that have split off — and we do.

Have a listen here.