Origins and the Evolution of Communication
Angelo Tartabini
Abstract
Language has deeply shaped our world, and has not strongly and subtantially cut the bonds between chimpanzee
and man. The origin of language probably goes back to a period in which man had already perfected upright
walking and had freed his hands and arms from the ground for locomotion.This happened thanks to a
contemporary morphological evolution of mouth, palate muscles, tongue, larynx, pharynx and epiglottis, the
fundamental muscles for phonation.There is no doubt that chimpanzees have the intelligence for forming mental
representations of objects and manipulating them. There is an interesting psychological evolutionary theory
which postulates that courtship and sex could have played an important role in the evolution of communication
and language in apes and humans.
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