'Language' evolved 30-40 million years ago

[Still Waters 49,999]

The capacity for language is built upon our ability to understand combinations of words and the relationships between them, but the evolutionary history of this ability is little understood. Now, researchers from the University of Warwick have managed to date this capacity to at least 30-40 million years ago, the last common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans.

Across the globe, humanity flourishes by sharing thoughts, culture, information and technology through language—an incredibly complex method of communication used by no other species. Determining why and when it evolved is, therefore, crucial to understanding what it means to be human.

In the paper, 'Non adjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes and humans', published today in the journal Science Advances, an international consortium of researchers, led by Professor Simon Townsend at the University of Warwick, made a crucial advance in our understanding of when a key cognitive building block of language may have evolved.

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-blocks-language-evolved-million.html

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/43/eabb0725

[third_eye 47,720]

...and nagging followed soon after. 

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[Abramelin 3,247]

Maybe they shouldn't focus on monkeys and apes....

https://www.gizhub.com/crows-smarter-apes-language

Sorry, couldn't help it, lol!