why so many languages, even those seemingly completely unrelated, tend to use variations of “mama” and “papa” as a shorthand reference to your parents?
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There is increasing amounts of evidence that a global language or writing system existed in stone age times. [The same symbols have been found carved on cave walls on every continent](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/mg30990701.jpg). And they’re not just simple symbols that an illiterate child might come up with (like a cross or a circle).
The other explanation is that some person or group of persons in the stone age could cross oceans and continents and for some reason carved hundreds of symbols at dozens of sites. And they did that without running into trouble with other humans or wildlife, for years and years.
The first theory is more likely than the second. It doesn’t definitively answer your question and it’s a bit of a stretch to try and say there was also a common global phonetic system and that certain symbols represented mama and papa. But it’s possible.
It’s also a stretch to say that various seemingly unrelated languages have some commonality to their origin if you go back all the way to the stone age. But that’s possible too.
But you would think that parents and family have always been important to humans. And that even such early and primitive writing/symbol/whatever systems would represent parents somehow.
Obviously nobody can say for sure and maybe my reply is too speculative, but I like that idea better than “plosives are the easiest sounds for an infant to make”.
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