ArticlePLoS biology2014
How could language have evolved?
Article in PLoS biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The allostery principle supports the symbolic character of signaling circuits: gene regulation provides a form of intelligence to living systems.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Article
- Linking GABAergic and Dopaminergic Neurotransmission: Effects on Neural Activity During Human Speech Control.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Language dysfunction as a primary feature of cognitive decline in neurological populations.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2026Review
- Natural selection and language genes in humans.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion.Science advances · 2025Article
- Social and individual factors mediate chimpanzee vocal ontogeny.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Talking Dogs: The Paradoxes Inherent in the Cultural Phenomenon of Soundboard Use by Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Article
- No evidence for language syntax in songbird vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Why did humans surpass all other primates? Are our brains so different? Part 2.Dementia & neuropsychologia · 2024Review
- Nonadjacent dependencies and sequential structure of chimpanzee action during a natural tool-use task.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Linguistic law-like compression strategies emerge to maximize coding efficiency in marmoset vocal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Call combinations and compositional processing in wild chimpanzees.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Experimental evidence for core-Merge in the vocal communication system of a wild passerine.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties.Communications biology · 2022Article
- The evolution of language by sexual selection.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000-100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.
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