How did humans learn to talk, anyway?
Vervet monkeys use different words (or, at least, “different alarm calls to refer to different types of predators, such as snakes and leopards”) but don’t arrange them into diverse kinds of sentences. Songbirds, meanwhile, create elaborate sentences with a variety of notes, but the notes don’t act as words the way the monkey alarm calls do.
It’s only preliminary research, but linguist Shigeru Miyagawa thinks human language may have evolved from the combination of a monkey-type system and a songbird-type system.
