Do you know the tale of the Tower of Babel? And do you believe in it?
Synopsis
There used to be a prosperous place where everyone spoke a single language. To flaunt their huge power, these people attempted to build a tower as high as heaven, using brick and asphalt. God, in anger with their arrogance, gave them a diversity of spoken languages in order to disturb their work. Mixed up with this interference, people couldn't manage to complete the construction and eventually scattered across the world.
This is just an imaginary story, but it has been largely (at least in Japan) used to explain to children why people living in different places speak different languages. Ever wondered how your language emerged? In spite of years of study, the true answer to this question has not been revealed yet. To fill the linguistic gap, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, a Polish linguist, invented an artificial language called Esperanto, but this attempt has not fulfilled its ultimate goal of uniting the world with an identical language. Anyhow it has been a focus of interest in how languages differentiate.
Earlier this year, a study conducted by a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand suggested that from a phonemic perspective, the majority of modern languages seem to have originated from a singleton. This theory is interesting in that on contrary to the currently common views that each language locally emerged independently of others, it claims that there is a simple, yet significant phonic pattern which can be considered to have branched off from an African language. According to a review article, a longer migration distance from Africa decreases a language's diversity of phonemes; some African languages have more than a hundred phonemes whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13.
I think Atkinson's hypothesis is persuasive because australopithecus, the ancestors of Homo sapiens, were born in Africa and so it is natural to think that the language spoken in mother Africa is the mother tongue of the human race.
Seems like the Tower of Babel existed in Africa.
References
Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born — The New York Times
Atkinson, QD: Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Science 332(6027):346–349, 2011.
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