Language is the foundation of everything we are, yet its origin is one of the most frustrating mysteries in science. We don’t know when the first true words were spoken, and it may not have even been ...

When did the first humans start speaking? Did we always have this ability, inherited from our immediate ancestors? These questions sound impossible to answer — but not quite so. A new study, drawing ...

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 ...

Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic ...

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 ...

Two new studies hint at the evolutionary roots of human language. The studies found that chimps use rhythmic structures and complex call combinations to communicate. This next story could not be ...