Mastodawn

I know I can research this, but I don't have time or space at the moment. But I'm wondering:

when did humans start giving their babies distinct names?

Was the first true name just the sound that the mother kept making over and over every time she interacted with the infant? And the rest of the tribe started making the same sound in regard to the infant?

Or was it something more complex than that? I'm assuming adults "named" each other sometime before they first named their infants....

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Owen

@courtcan
We don’t know and probably never will, but I suspect names of some sort might even predate language.

That said, a Chinese friend told me - although I haven’t verified this, to be clear - it’s only recently that all Chinese women had given names. Before then poorer women were officially just “daughter of so-and-so family”.

So the answer in some cases might be unsettlingly recent.