Examining how primates make vowel sounds pushes timeline for speech evolution back by 27 million years
- Written by Thomas R. Sawallis, Visiting Scholar in New College, University of Alabama
Baboons make sounds, but how does it relate to human speech?Creative Wrights/Shutterstock.com
Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either.
Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, they’re fully formed,...

