For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

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 ...

Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of ...

Human language capacities developed primarily to aid in rearing children, according to this lucid debut from biologist Beekman. Babies are born “underbaked,” Beekman writes, explaining that because ...