Topic

Gestural origins of language

A family of hypotheses holding that human communication began in manual gesture and shifted later to speech, supported mainly by the gesture systems of other apes and by how people improvise when they share no language.

Current clusters

science1 publisher

To explain why most languages are spoken, a new paper turns to the campfire

Researchers at the University of St Andrews argue that firelight was bright enough to gather around and too dim to read a gesture by. Ancestral vocal tracts left no fossils, so the case rests on measurements of people alive now.

Publishers:scientificamerican.com

Reality

Evidence36
Adoption: Insufficient
Hype gap+14
Incentives34
Confidence45