Thousands of years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers roamed the steppes of southern Russia, fishing in its rivers and hunting across its vast grasslands. They lived in a world without settlements, ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

Until relatively recently, it was not considered good form to speculate on the origin of language. And, in part, this was a sound position to adopt. By the time that Charles Darwin published On the ...