Noam Chomsky. In 1965, he wrote: “A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting grammars and their independence of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state . . . leave little hope that much of the structure of

In the past, when trying to explain how our ancestors developed, we have often focused on a source of energy or a physical technology that aided their progress – for example, the invention of the wheel, the discovery of coal or the arrival of the plough. But what about the social technologies that helped organise us in pursuit of common goals by en

none of our animal examples—from bees to sticklebacks and monkeys—exhibit all of the properties we see in human language: the vocal medium, interchangeability, arbitrariness and displacement.