The fossilised bones of our ancestors remain silent. So, how can we possibly imagine what our earliest languages sounded like?

John Gowlett receives funding from PAST Africa and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his work has previously been supported by The Leverhulme Trust. He is associated with a new series of podcasts on human ...

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

A new study suggests that the fundamental abilities underlying human language and technological culture may have evolved before humans and apes diverged millions of years ago. A new study suggests ...

A growing body of genetic evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Denisovans carried many of the same regulatory gene networks linked to language and vocal anatomy in modern humans, challenging the ...

My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him ...