A new theoretical paper suggests that human cognitive and linguistic evolution was driven by early humans’ ability to be clever and humorous, an idea dubbed the “survival of the wittiest.” The ...

What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead to ...

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, cultural, and societal shifts. Studying the evolution of languages can thus ...

Learn more about Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs), genetic regulatory regions that may have shaped language skill in modern humans and Neanderthals. Language is one of the things that ...

South Africa has one of the world’s richest fossil records of hominins (humans and their fossil ancestors). But many misconceptions still exist regarding human evolution, and school textbooks contain ...