A possible 40,000-year-old proto-writing system is reshaping the story of humanity’s earliest methods of communication.

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others. By Carl Zimmer In 1786, a British judge named William ...

Human language capacities developed primarily to aid in rearing children, according to this lucid debut from biologist Beekman. Babies are born “underbaked,” Beekman writes, explaining that because ...