Firelight and the origins of spoken language

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Darwin described fire as man’s greatest discovery, excepting language. Here, we develop a theory for the origin of language that combines both touchstones of human evolution. First, we show that precursors to language were likely rooted in gestural systems shared by living apes. Next, we show that attempts to explain the origins of language for solving everyday social problems is a) undermined by evidence of comparable abilities in other species and, b) based on an overstated need for language to sustain small-scale group-living. Instead, we draw attention to storytelling by firelight as the driver of human language origins and evolution.