The sounds made by sperm whales are “one of the closest parallels” in the animal kingdom to the language of humans, a study ...

Progovac's study challenges two dominant narratives in human evolution: "survival of the fittest" (physical strength) and "survival of the friendliest" (prosociality). While both played a role, ...

The mechanisms behind the development of human language are one of the great mysteries of primate evolution. Biologists have identified certain genes that play a role in human speech and are ...

In A Nutshell A linguist argues that wit, humor, and wordplay helped drive human language evolution through sexual selection, adding a dimension most theories have overlooked. Ancient compound words ...

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 ...

Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago. It is a deep ...

Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our ...

Humpback whale song is a striking example of a complex, culturally transmitted behavior, but up to now, there was little evidence it has language-like structure. Human language, which is also ...

A new study suggests that the NOVA1 gene may have been a key player in the evolution of human language. By Carl Zimmer Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words ...

Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the University of Southampton, and specializes in animal behavior, evolution, palaeontology, and the environment. Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the ...