Examining how primates make vowel sounds pushes timeline for speech evolution back by 27 million years
The Conversation
Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either.
Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, they’re fully formed, made up of words, sentences and grammar carried from one person to another by speech sounds, like any of the perhaps 6,000 languages spoken today.
So if you believe, as we linguists do, that language is the foundational distinction between humans and other intelligent animals, how can we study its emergence in our ancestors?