Caveman linguistics

Today's SMBC:

The mouseover title: "I was trying to figure out why cavemen sometimes do and sometimes don't drop prepositions. Anyone have a theory?"

The Aftercomic:

If "cavemen" were early members of our species, and if their languages were like those of recent hunter-gatherer peoples, linguists' hypothesis about those languages would be somewhere between "just like us" and "more morpho-phonologically complex" (due to lack of the simplification caused by language mixture and second-language learning in larger groups).

If "cavemen" means "Neanderthals and Denisovans", we have no real basis to judge. But a plausible guess would be "same".

Update — Some background on pirate accents:

"R!", 11/03/2003 "Type like a pirate day", 9/9/2004 "R!?", 9/19/2005 "Type like a pirate", 9/18/2006 "Pirate R as I-R-eland", 9/20/2006 "Powarrr law", 9/20/2006 "Post like a pirate", 9/19/2007 "R", 9/9/2008 "It be that day again", 9/19./2008 "Said the Pirate King, Aaarrrf", 9/27/2010 "R R R", 9/19/2012 "Talk like a pirate", 9/19/2017 "International Talk Like a Pirate Day, again…", 9/22/2024