Progovac's study challenges two dominant narratives in human evolution: "survival of the fittest" (physical strength) and "survival of the friendliest" (prosociality). While both played a role, ...

In A Nutshell A linguist argues that wit, humor, and wordplay helped drive human language evolution through sexual selection, ...

Is wit a sign of evolutionary fitness? A new study explores how "quick-wittedness" and ancient verb-noun compounds shaped the evolution of human grammar through sexual selection. Learn how "killjoys" ...

The mechanisms behind the development of human language are one of the great mysteries of primate evolution. Biologists have identified certain genes that play a role in human speech and are ...

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 ...

Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago. It is a deep ...

A new study suggests that the NOVA1 gene may have been a key player in the evolution of human language. By Carl Zimmer Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words ...

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 ...