anguage has been one of our species’ most fundamental breakthroughs, allowing us to communicate in extraordinary detail across an infinite range of subjects, so understanding its origins is central to our understanding of what it means to be human.
New research indicates our ancestors first began to build crude relationships between words as early as 30 million years ago. Today, our species flourishes by sharing thoughts, culture, information and technology through language — while no other species is known to be able to do so.
However, the fundamental early “building blocks” of language have been found in today’s monkeys and apes by scientists from the University of Warwick and the University of Zurich.
