ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
The evolution of the capacity for language: the ecological context and adaptive value of a process of cognitive hijacking.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Valuing Behavioral By-Products: Evolutionary Significance of Neutrally Drifting and Exaptive Cultures in Primates.American journal of primatology · 2026Review
- 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
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Human and chimpanzee shared and divergent neurobiological systems for general and specific cognitive brain functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Neuroplasticity enables bio-cultural feedback in Paleolithic stone-tool making.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes.PloS one · 2023Article
- A socio-ecological perspective on the gestural communication of great ape species, individuals, and social units.Ethology, ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Language evolution: examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Baseline Cortical Thickness Reductions in Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: Brain Regions Associated with Conversion to Psychosis Versus Non-Conversion as Assessed at One-Year Follow-Up in the Shanghai-At-Risk-for-Psychosis (SHARP) Study.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2021Article
- Discrimination of natural acoustic variation in vocal signals.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- An Evolutionary Perspective on Why Food Overconsumption Impairs Cognition.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2019Review
- Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Integrative studies of cultural evolution: crossing disciplinary boundaries to produce new insights.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Language plays a pivotal role in the evolution of human culture, yet the evolution of the capacity for language-uniquely within the hominin lineage-remains little understood. Bringing together insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, archaeology and behavioural ecology, we hypothesize that this singular occurrence was triggered by exaptation, or 'hijacking', of existing cognitive mechanisms related to sequential processing and motor execution. Observed coupling of the communication system with circuits related to complex action planning and control supports this proposition, but the prehistoric ecological contexts in which this coupling may have occurred and its adaptive value remain elusive. Evolutionary reasoning rules out most existing hypotheses regarding the ecological context of language evolution, which focus on ultimate explanations and ignore proximate mechanisms. Coupling of communication and motor systems, although possible in a short period on evolutionary timescales, required a multi-stepped adaptive process, involving multiple genes and gene networks. We suggest that the behavioural context that exerted the selective pressure to drive these sequential adaptations had to be one in which each of the systems undergoing coupling was
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