Origin Of The Human Voice

Experts believe that the voice coming from living beings, such as animals and humans are powered by the lungs and emitted through the mouth. Technically, this is correct. But did you know that every voice (animal or human) comes from a common ancestor? The common ancestor is something we didn’t expect: primordial fish. Science Focus has the details:

To understand how this could possibly be so, we must travel to a time around 530 million years ago, when the first fish evolved. Like their living descendants, these ancient fish sustained life by extracting oxygen from the water and expelling CO2 with a specialised membrane that lines the inside of the throat: gills.

Some of these primordial fish, however, evolved in shallow lakes or swamps and during droughts would become stranded on land. Many suffocated to death, but at least one was lucky enough to undergo one of those random mutations that drive natural selection.

In this case, a possible copying error in one of the genes responsible for building gills, rendering the subtly altered membrane capable of pulling a little oxygen from the air – a tiny sip that kept the landlocked fish alive long enough, not only to survive the dry spell, but to mate and pass along the mutated gill gene and the tiny survival advantage it conferred to its offspring.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, and many other random mutations that improved the animal’s ability to survive on land, a new species evolved in these swampy, shallow-water areas, a transitional, hybrid animal that possessed both water-breathing gills and rudimentary air-breathing lungs, which had formed from the hollow swim bladders it used for flotation. These creatures are known as lungfish, and they are our oldest air-breathing, land-dwelling relatives.