ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tries to weave a story as to how language might have evolved, beginning with the Chomskyan notion that true language is uniquely human, and dependent on rules rather than on associative learning. The modern understanding of language has become a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, with contributions from linguistics, psychology, genetics, archeology, and neuroscience. Most obviously, it is a communication system, but it is much more than that. Most animals communicate with one another, but do so in ways that we would not recognize as language. Moreover, by referring to “limitless thought”, Noam Chomsky seemed to imply that the uniqueness of the human mind goes beyond language itself, although many routine mental abilities, such as memory, perception, attention, even reasoning, can be inferred from the behaviors of other animals, and especially those closest to humans on the evolutionary tree.
