ABSTRACT
My wandering in time led me back to perhaps the most difficult challenge in human science, how language itself evolved. Noam Chomsky and others have argued that it emerged in a single step - the “great leap forward” - exclusively in our own species, Homo sapiens. Over the past decade, including some contretemps with Chomsky, I have tried to restore Darwinian continuity by arguing instead that language evolved to allow us to communicate about the non-present, the stuff of our mental time travels, and indeed of our imagination more generally. This probably occurred incrementally over the past two to three million years, rather than in a single miraculous event.
