When asked about the greatest innovation of humans, people will often say language or fire. A new paper suggests that these innovations may be more interlinked than we previously assumed.
Understanding how human language evolved is one of the hardest problems in science to unpick, since writing is a relatively recent innovation. Also, the vocal tracts and brains of our ancestors did not fossilise as they were made of soft tissue. We are left, then, with indirect evidence about how humans and other apes communicate today.
