What are linguists afraid of? They had better pull their heads out of the sand, because no trait, not even our beloved linguistic ability, ever comes about de novo. Nothing evolves all of a sudden, without antecedents. Every new trait taps into existing structures and processes. Thus, Wernicke’s area, a part of the brain central to human speech, is recognizable in the great apes, in which it is enlarged on the left side, as it is in us.27 This obviously raises the question of what this particular brain region was doing in our ancestors before it was recruited for language.
