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So a better theory might be that vocal language evolved among our more fearful ancestors, calling out to one another when they spotted a predator in their territory.
Mature breath control, the sort adults use to talk every day, doesn’t seem to kick in until age five.
Men have 10–12 percent more absolute lung volume per pound of body mass than women do, which means that at any given moment they should have more oxygen to yell out warnings about incoming tigers.
women’s ribs don’t sit in our bodies the way men’s do. Women’s ribs pinch inward at the bottom, just a bit, which is a big part of why women’s waists are narrower than men’s.
Evolution endowed teenage Hillary with that female rib cage for a good reason: She needed room for future Chelseas.
Recent research supports this: when we speak, women’s brains send more frequent impulse signals to the diaphragm and “inspiratory” muscles than men’s do. To put it simply, women ask them to work harder and more often, which requires more involved neurological control.
No single monkey call approaches the length of a middling human sentence.
Dolphins and whales are able to hold their breath for a long time, and even pulse out streams of bubbles, but their primary communication is made of clicks, squeals, and sonar that don’t particularly involve the lungs.
We strain our vocal cords more than men do. This is especially true of women who talk and sing for a living: teachers, professional speakers, actors, tour guides.
If you’re a woman who uses your voice professionally, you’re more likely to see a doctor about your strained vocal cords than a man who does the same work.
What’s odd about this is that the female vocal instrument isn’t inherently mo...
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But we’re all quieter than we used to be, because hominins lost their throat sacs.
Like many primates, today’s chimps, gorillas, and orangutans all have throat sacs.
Still, while a hefty throat sac lets you get loud, you can’t be precise. That’s not a problem if you’re communicating with only a limited range of hoot-pants and alarm calls. But if you want to talk, booming through a throat sac just won’t do.
speech benefited from their absence.
Infections of their laryngeal pouches are one of the leading challenges in keeping captive primates healthy.
Starting around the time of Homo erectus, the hominin larynx dropped lower in our throats, giving the tongue more room to do all the complex, twisty, acrobatic stuff we do to produce spoken language.
A lower larynx also lets us better manipulate the pitch of our speech—a key feature of the modern human voice.
human males are able to hit bass notes that would normally be made only by animals three times their size.
Higher-pitched women’s voices are more desirable and more likable. In modern Japan, for instance, young women famously speak to men in a higher pitch, saving their “normal,” lower-pitched speaking voices for conversations with women.
It can be hard to untangle what parts of the human voice are cultural and what parts are evolution-driven,
but women with naturally lower-pitched voices tend to have less estrogen in their systems overall.
At ovulation, both a woman’s larynx and her vagina seem to hit “peak mucus”:
As estrogens drop with menopause, the entire vocal system can get a little out of whack.
The strongest muscle in the human body, in terms of absolute pressure, is the masseter muscle of the jaw.
The uterus is the strongest muscle in the body in terms of constricting pressure. But when it comes to muscles that have both strength and flexibility, the clear winner is the human tongue, which has to roll and push a bolus of mashed food from side to side around the mouth, getting the un-mashed bits better mashed before swallowing, all while dodging the powerful slice and crunch of the moving teeth.
But if chimps are any example, our tongue is far more flexible than the tongues of our ancestors.
Also, a large hole in our jaw called the hypoglossal canal lets a fat trunk of nerves pass from our brains to our neck, jaw, and mouth.
It was only around the time of Neanderthals and Heidelbergensis—very recent hominins, the sort Homo sapiens had sex with—that the larynx and hyoid bone are as low in the throat as they are in modern humans.
when you look across the span of recent research on the evolution of language, the latest science is moving away from the “humans are just so special” angle toward something a bit simpler, a bit more accidental.
A significant part of why ancient hominins were able to invent vocal language may be that our Eves evolved to walk upright.
FROM ZERO TO A THOUSAND IN THREE YEARS
For language to evolve and be maintained in the way it has, ancient babies needed constant exposure to another language user while their brains were growing.
Our capacity for learning and innovating in language is innate, but nevertheless, for the largest gains in intergenerational communication to persist over time, each generation has to pass language on to the next with careful effort, interactive learning, and guided development.[*10] Language, in other words, is something that mothers and their babies make together and is dependent on the relationship between them in those first critical three to five years of human life.
You also start mimicking the musical qualities of the language around you, which is probably something you learned in the womb.
French babies cry in a rising melody, which happens to be the typical way French people speak, with their pitch tending to rise a bit at the ends of words or phrases. German newborns, meanwhile, cry with a pitch that falls down—a typical German speech pattern.
you—newborns recognize (and preferentially respond to) their mother’s voice,
The language regions of your brain hit peak density around your third year, which is precisely when your vocabulary explodes. Before, you had only a few dozen words. Now you rapidly learn hundreds.
For fluency in a second language, the cutoff ranges anywhere between ages ten and seventeen, depending on whom you ask.
Mom, in other words, is at least half of how language happens.
The first thing a mother does after she recovers from the exhaustion of birthing her baby is change the music of how she talks.
From Arabic to English, Korean to Marathi, Xhosa to Latvian, and back again, mothers talk to babies in essentially the same ways.
Men do it, too, though a bit less and a bit differently.
Motherese is so universal, in fact, that we do it not just with babies but also with our pets or to tease an adult we think is acting childish.
Babies whose mothers put more emphasis on vowels tend to perform better on language tasks later.
Up to the first year of life, babies can distinguish between all sorts of different phonemes. But once they pass a year, they’re only able to distinguish phonemes from their parents’ native tongue.
it’s still extremely rare for a human being to be nonverbal.
Other cases of kids being isolated from language haven’t exactly gone well. In nearly every instance, they never develop real linguistic fluency.[*29] There seems to be something about forming those critical relationships with other communication partners—first in infancy, then throughout toddlerhood, especially, and on through childhood—that really matters for developing the sort of fluency we associate with human language.
So in essence the story of language may be about windows of brain plasticity: times in our young lives when our minds can still build those critical pathways, which just so happen to be perfectly timed to coincide with breast-feeding and motherese.
Faulkner was able to write a single, grammatically correct sentence that contained 1,292 words, but that was just an artist at play.
