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Could Adam and Eve speak, and in what language did they converse with God? Until a few decades ago modern scholars held that human speech began with Cro-Magnon Man some 35,000 years ago and that languages developed locally among diverse clans no more than 8,000 to 12,000 years ago. This is not the biblical view according to which Adam and Eve conversed in an understandable language, and that prior to the Tower of Babel incident "the whole Earth was of one language and one kind of words." In the 1960s and 1970s word comparisons led_ scholars to conclude that all the thousands of different languages- including those of Native Americans—could be grouped into three primary ones. Later fossil discoveries in Israel revealed that 60,000 years ago Neanderthals could already speak as we do. The conclusion that there indeed had been a single Mother Tongue some 100,000 years ago has been con- firmed in mid-1994 by updated studies at the University of California at Berkeley. The advances in genetic research, now applied to speech and language, suggest that these abilities, distinguishing hu- mans from apes, are of a genetic origin. Genetic studies indicate that there indeed had been an "Eve," a sole mother of us all-and that she appeared 200,000-250,000 years ago with "the gift of gab." Some Fundamentalists would believe that the Mother Tongue was Hebrew, the language of the Holy Bible. Perhaps, but probably not: Hebrew stems from Akkadian (the first "Se- mitic" language) that was preceded by Sumerian. Was it then Sumerian, the language of the people who had settled in Shine'ar? But that was only after the Deluge, whereas Meso- potamian texts refer to a pre-Diluvial language. Anthropologist Kathleen Gibson of the University of Texas at Houston believes that humans acquired language and mathematics at the same time. Was the First Language that of the Anunnaki themselves, taught to Mankind as all other knowledge? years THE FIRST LANGUAGE