THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewh ere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scien tific lite...[Read more]