An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

Why do we talk the way we do? It might trace back to when our ancient ancestors left the jungle for the open savanna. Somewhere between 5.3 million and 16 million years ago, Africa's landscapes ...

A growing body of genetic evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Denisovans carried many of the same regulatory gene networks linked to language and vocal anatomy in modern humans, challenging the ...

RESEARCH on the evolution of language suggests that our communication is largely about cooperation. When we speak with each other, the idea goes, we do so to help coordinate our actions. Antelope ...

I prefer to keep to what is actually understood about evolutionary biology and not indulge in what evolutionary biologists dismiss as 'just-so' stories... stories we invent... 'maybe it happened this ...

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

A new Science paper challenges the idea that language stems from a single evolutionary root. Instead, it proposes that our ability to communicate evolved through the interaction of biology and culture ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It’s relatively easy to trace a written linguistic history ...

This research was supported by funding from: The National Center for Competence in Research "Evolving Language" (SNSF agreement number 51NF40_180888) Swiss National Science Foundation (project grant ...