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Science

How Did Human Language Evolve? A New Multidisciplinary Roadmap

12:05 PM, 11/27/2025
How Did Human Language Evolve? A New Multidisciplinary Roadmap

This article summarizes a new framework published in Science that treats the evolution of human language as the result of multiple converging developments—vocal learning, linguistic structure (grammar), and heightened sociality. Authored by ten specialists across disciplines, the proposal rejects single-cause theories and promotes a biocultural, interdisciplinary research agenda. The authors emphasize that combining new data sources and perspectives will better illuminate language’s complex origins.

Humans are unique in their ability to use highly complex and nuanced language, but tracing how that capacity arose is especially challenging—spoken words leave no fossil record. A new framework published in Science rejects single-cause explanations and proposes an integrative roadmap for studying the origins of language.

Authored by a team of ten experts from fields including linguistics, psychology and molecular genetics, the proposal argues that language emerged from multiple converging developments in human evolution rather than from one single mutation or event.

Key factors highlighted by the researchers include:

  • Vocal learning: The capacity to learn new vocalizations from experience is essential for speech. Species such as songbirds and some bats show vocal learning, but that ability alone does not produce the complexity of human language.
  • Linguistic structure: The emergence of grammar and compositional rules—ways to recombine meaningful elements—is central to language, but it depends on specific cognitive and representational capacities.
  • Sociality: Language is fundamentally a social tool. Humans are unusually motivated to share information and collaborate, creating selective pressures that favor communication systems with greater complexity and flexibility.

The framework stresses that none of these components alone would have been sufficient; together they created ecological, cognitive and cultural conditions that allowed language to flourish. The authors emphasize a biocultural perspective: genetic, neural and social-cultural processes interact over generations to shape communication systems.

“Crucially, our goal was not to come up with our own particular explanation of language evolution,” said study author Inbal Arnon. “Instead, we wanted to show how multifaceted and biocultural perspectives, combined with newly emerging sources of data, can shed new light on old questions.”

Rather than presenting a single origin story, the paper offers a structured agenda for future research: integrate comparative studies across species, combine genetic and cognitive data, and investigate how cultural transmission and social environments shape linguistic structure. Untangling language’s origins, the authors argue, will require the same interdisciplinary, cooperative approach that likely produced language in the first place.

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