ABSTRACT
There are many different animal species on our planet, but only one of them has developed the capacity of making and understanding speech, and that is us. Even our closest relatives, the apes, are incapable of it. Speech is no trivial thing. It is probably the single mostthing that makes us different from other animals and capable of improving ourselves. So we have to wonder when in our evolutionary path from bipedal ape to modern human did we acquire speech. Anthropologists have speculated about it and come up with different times and scenarios, but the question is still unresolved. Now it seems logical to me that human speech must have evolved gradually over the last million years or even earlier. Homo erectus is associated during this period with stone toolmaking, the use of fire, hunting large animals, and sleeping on the ground rather than in the safety of trees. These activities seem to require some communication between group members to facilitate learning these skills or planning coordinated events. Furthermore, we know that the brain of Homo erectus was significantly larger than that of the earlier Australopiths. What would drive brain expansion better than even more complex speech development?
