Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?

Human language is unique among all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, and so-called sign ‘language’ in Great Apes is nothing like human language. Language evolution shares many features with b...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Pagel, Mark
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Question and Answer
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525259/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28738867
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3
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author Pagel, Mark
author_facet Pagel, Mark
author_sort Pagel, Mark
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description Human language is unique among all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, and so-called sign ‘language’ in Great Apes is nothing like human language. Language evolution shares many features with biological evolution, and this has made it useful for tracing recent human history and for studying how culture evolves among groups of people with related languages. A case can be made that language has played a more important role in our species’ recent (circa last 200,000 years) evolution than have our genes.
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spelling pubmed-55252592017-07-26 Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care? Pagel, Mark BMC Biol Question and Answer Human language is unique among all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, and so-called sign ‘language’ in Great Apes is nothing like human language. Language evolution shares many features with biological evolution, and this has made it useful for tracing recent human history and for studying how culture evolves among groups of people with related languages. A case can be made that language has played a more important role in our species’ recent (circa last 200,000 years) evolution than have our genes. BioMed Central 2017-07-24 /pmc/articles/PMC5525259/ /pubmed/28738867 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3 Text en © Pagel et al. 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Question and Answer
Pagel, Mark
Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
title Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
title_full Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
title_fullStr Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
title_full_unstemmed Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
title_short Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
title_sort q&a: what is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?
topic Question and Answer
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525259/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28738867
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3
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