Language: A Serious Problem for Deep Time

Language provides compelling
evidence that our history is
much shorter than we’ve been told

 

Language: A Serious Problem for Deep Time

by Ronald D. Fritz PhD

We are born into a world full of things we rarely stop to think about. One of the most remarkable is language.  It surrounds us every day, yet most people never consider where it came from, how it developed, or what it may reveal about humanity’s past.

Today, there are more than 7,000 actively spoken languages¹ belonging to an estimated 140–430 language families.^1-3 How did so many arise? Were they all derived from one original language? And does the evidence better support evolutionary deep time or the Biblical account of history?

A recent article sparked these very questions with its provocative headline:

Scientists think they have learned exactly when and how humans created the first language. (Ralls, E. Earth.com.) https://www.earth.com/news/when-humans-created-the-first-language-and-communication-skills/.  (2026, March 19).⁴ This article’s misleading title claims scientists discovered when and how humans “created” the first language 135,000 years ago, but the underlying study only concludes that the capacity for language already existed by that time — before the first major population split of Homo sapiens.”

But that title overstates what the underlying study actually concluded.

The research discussed⁵ did not discover how humans “created” language. Instead, it only argued that the capacity for language likely existed before the first major population split among Homo sapiens — which the researchers estimate occurred around 135,000 years ago.

As the article itself states:

“Together, these genetic studies suggest that human populations began splitting around 135,000 years ago, meaning that before this divergence, Homo sapiens was a single, undivided population. Since every group that branched out maintained the ability to communicate through language, this strongly suggests that language had already developed by this time.”

This fits within a broader mainstream framework claiming that humanity originally possessed a single language sometime between roughly 135,000 and 300,000 years ago.⁶ According to evolutionary theory, as human populations gradually separated geographically, their languages slowly diverged over immense spans of time until eventually producing the roughly 7,000 distinct languages we observe today.

The dates assigned to these events depend heavily on radiometric and thermoluminescence dating methods. These techniques rest on unprovable assumptions regarding initial conditions, decay rates, and long-term processes — assumptions that systematically bias the results toward deep time. For more on why these dates are highly contested, see:

• Beware of Overconfident Dating Methods (2017) → https://crev.info/2017/10/overconfident-rock-dates/
• Radiocarbon Assumptions Questioned (2020) → https://crev.info/2020/03/radiocarbon-assumptions-questioned/
• Dating Method Assumptions Can Be Way Off (2019) → https://crev.info/2019/08/dating-method-assumptions-can-be-way-off/

So, the mainstream picture is this:

• One original human population
• One original language
• Gradual diversification into thousands of languages over 135,000–300,000 years

This stands in sharp contrast to the Biblical account.

According to Genesis, Adam and Eve were created with a fully functional language from the beginning. Some creation researchers have suggested that this original language may have resembled Hebrew.⁸ Then, at the Tower of Babel roughly 4,350 years ago, God supernaturally divided mankind’s language into many distinct tongues — often estimated at around 70–100 original language groups corresponding to the nations listed in Genesis 10.

So, we are left with two radically different explanations:

• Mainstream view: 1 language became 7,000 over 135,000–300,000 years
• Biblical view: ~80 languages became 7,000 over roughly 4,350 years

At first glance, many people assume the mainstream explanation must fit the evidence better simply because it has more time available.

Surprisingly, the opposite is true.

A recent major study analyzing 18 major language families (covering roughly 3,000 languages) estimated an average diversification rate — how quickly new languages split off from existing ones — of approximately 0.001 new languages per year per existing language over the past 6,000 years.⁹

In other words, languages split and diversify at measurable rates. This rate aligns well with historical examples such as the Romance languages — French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and others — which diverged from Vulgar Latin within roughly 1,500–2,000 years. Germanic languages show similar patterns.¹⁰

Modeling Language Diversification

Using that published diversification rate, I modeled language growth using a standard statistical branching process (i.e., a ‘discrete-time stochastic birth process’) in which each language has a small probability of splitting into a new language each year.

The results were striking:

• Mainstream scenario: Starting with 1 language 135,000 years ago at a diversification rate of 0.001 per year
  • Expected result after only 20,000 years: roughly 450 million languages on average, with statistical ranges extending into the billions
• Biblical scenario: Starting with ~80 languages 4,350 years ago at the same diversification rate
  • Expected result today: roughly 6,100 languages, with bounds closely matching the approximately 7,000 languages actually observed

In short, the 7,000 languages we speak today all appear to have originated within the last 4,350 years — a near-perfect match for the Biblical timeline after Babel.

The bottom line: The Biblical timeframe fits the data perfectly. The deep-time scenario, by contrast, does not. Not even close.

Making Excuses for the Mismatch

So how do mainstream researchers respond to this obvious mismatch? The study simply concludes:

“Our results indicate that rates of linguistic diversification are not constant through time.”⁹

In other words, when present-day rates do not fit deep-time expectations, the rates are assumed to have been dramatically different in the distant past.

But this creates a serious tension with the broader uniformitarian assumptions often used to support deep time in geology and evolution — the idea that “the present is the key to the past.”^11,12 Modern rates of erosion, sedimentation, tectonic movement, and biological change are routinely extrapolated backward over immense timescales to argue for millions of years.

Yet in this case, applying observed linguistic diversification rates produces wildly unrealistic results for the evolutionary timeline.  This leaves mainstream theory needing an additional explanation: for more than 130,000 years, language diversification must have remained near zero, only occurring in comparatively recent history.

Rescuing Darwin from the Evidence

Various rescue explanations have been proposed:

• Many ancient languages must have disappeared
• Early hunter-gatherer populations may have remained too small and unstable for diversification
• Agricultural societies may have triggered rapid recent language expansion

But these are ultimately ad hoc attempts to preserve a deep-time framework that the observed rates themselves contradict.

This brings us back to language itself — one of those everyday realities we rarely stop to think about, something right in front of us that we simply take for granted.  Yet when carefully examined, it delivers a surprisingly sharp blow to deep time. The observed rates of language diversification fit the Biblical timeline of roughly 80 original languages at Babel just 4,350 years ago almost perfectly. In contrast, they create a mathematical absurdity under the evolutionary deep-time model. Once again, the evidence speaks clearly — and it does not support the vast ages demanded by uniformitarian assumptions. Language, it turns out, is far more than a communication tool. It is compelling evidence that our history is much shorter than we’ve been told.

References:

1. Ethnologue (2026). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (29th edition). SIL International. https://www.ethnologue.com/

2. Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2026). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (29th ed.). SIL International. https://www.ethnologue.com/

3. Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (2026). Glottolog 5.3. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://glottolog.org/

4. Ralls, E. (2026, March 19). Study learns exactly when humans created the first language. Earth.com. https://www.earth.com/news/when-humans-created-the-first-language-and-communication-skills/

5. Miyagawa, S., DeSalle, R., Nóbrega, V. A., Nitschke, R., Okumura, M., & Tattersall, I. (2025). Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1503900. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900.

6. Hublin, J.-J., Ben-Ncer, A., Bailey, S. E., Freidline, S. E., Neubauer, S., Skinner, M. M., Bergmann, I., Le Cabec, A., Benazzi, S., Harvati, K., & Gunz, P. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature, 546(7657), 289–292. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22336

7. Progovac, L. (2016). A gradualist scenario for language evolution: Precise linguistic reconstruction of early human (mostly syntax) languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1714. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01714

8. Sarfati, J. (2015). The Genesis Account: A Theological, Historical, and Scientific Commentary on Genesis 1–11. Creation Book Publishers.

9. Hamilton, M. J., Walker, R. S., & DeLong, J. P. (2019). Nonlinear diversification rates of linguistic phylogenies over the Holocene. PLOS ONE, 14(7), e0219449. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219449

10. Campbell, L. (2013). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (3rd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.

11. Geikie, Archibald. Text-Book of Geology (1882), p. 3.

12. William D. Thornbury, Principles of Geomorphology (1954), p. 16-17.

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Ronald D. Fritz, PhD, is a retired research statistician whose career spanned 27 years. Before entering the field of statistics, he worked as an engineer and engineering manager in the defense industry. He earned his doctorate in Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Mathematical Statistics, from Clemson University, where he was honored as a Dean’s Scholar. Dr. Fritz served as a consulting statistician across a broad range of industries, culminating in a 12-year role as a global statistical resource at PepsiCo. During his time at PepsiCo, he led significant research on gluten contamination in oats and its relationship to celiac disease, publishing several articles on the subject.

In retirement, Dr. Fritz developed a deep interest in creation science, sparked by a visit to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. As he delved into the topic, he shared his findings with his pastor, which led to an invitation to speak at their church. This initial presentation opened the door to further speaking engagements at churches throughout the region. Dr. Fritz has been married for 35 years to his wife, Mitzie. They live in the mountain community of Bee Log, North Carolina, within sight of the church where they were married and now worship. In his free time, Dr. Fritz tends a small chestnut orchard on their property, working to revive what was once a cherished local delicacy. The couple has two adult children.