Richard Futrell, an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine Department of Language Science, contends that we have to ask how we got to where we are today starting with what other animals have, which is a small repertoire of sounds and signals with various meanings. “We really don’t have any evidence for what would have happened in between,” says Futrell. … “We do see pretty complex communication by hand gestures among the great apes, which is our closest evolutionary ancestor,” says Futrell.

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