ReviewScience advances2019
Which way to the dawn of speech?: Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science.
Review in Science advances, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The prefrontal operculum, a human-specific hub for the cognitive control of speech.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Formant analysis of vertebrate vocalizations: achievements, pitfalls, and promises.BMC biology · 2025Review
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Dog-human vocal interactions match dogs' sensory-motor tuning.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Auditory thresholds compatible with optimal speech reception likely evolved before the human-chimpanzee split.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Correction: 'Chimpanzee vowel-like sounds and voice quality suggest formant space expansion through the hominoid lineage' (2021), by GrawunderPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The relevance of the unique anatomy of the human prefrontal operculum to the emergence of speech.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Sequence variants affecting voice pitch in humans.Science advances · 2023Article
- Sound Visualization Demonstrates Velopharyngeal Coupling and Complex Spectral Variability in Asian Elephants.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Sociality predicts orangutan vocal phenotype.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Cardiovascular mechanisms underlying vocal behavior in freely moving macaque monkeys.iScience · 2022Article
- Vocal size exaggeration may have contributed to the origins of vocalic complexity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Chimpanzee vowel-like sounds and voice quality suggest formant space expansion through the hominoid lineage.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Predicting strength from aggressive vocalizations versus speech in African bushland and urban communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Roars, groans and moans: Anatomical correlates of vocal diversity in polygynous deer.Journal of anatomy · 2021Article
- Orangutan information broadcast via consonant-like and vowel-like calls breaches mathematical models of linguistic evolution.Biology letters · 2021Article
- The sounds of prehistoric speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Article
- Chimpanzee lip-smacks confirm primate continuity for speech-rhythm evolution.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Differential DNA methylation of vocal and facial anatomy genes in modern humans.Nature communications · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent articles on primate articulatory abilities are revolutionary regarding speech emergence, a crucial aspect of language evolution, by revealing a human-like system of proto-vowels in nonhuman primates and implicitly throughout our hominid ancestry. This article presents both a schematic history and the state of the art in primate vocalization research and its importance for speech emergence. Recent speech research advances allow more incisive comparison of phylogeny and ontogeny and also an illuminating reinterpretation of vintage primate vocalization data. This review produces three major findings. First, even among primates, laryngeal descent is not uniquely human. Second, laryngeal descent is not required to produce contrasting formant patterns in vocalizations. Third, living nonhuman primates produce vocalizations with contrasting formant patterns. Thus, evidence now overwhelmingly refutes the long-standing laryngeal descent theory, which pushes back "the dawn of speech" beyond ~200 ka ago to over ~20 Ma ago, a difference of two orders of magnitude.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.