Human language may have evolved from bird song

Feb 23, 2013 |

Nearly 142 years after Charles Darwin wrote that the sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language, MIT researchers have now found that bird song closely resembles human speech.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo, say that Darwin was right when he wrote in The Descent of Man (1871) contemplating how humans learnt to speak language, could have had its origins in singing.
The balance of evidence, researchers believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.

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