Progovac's study challenges two dominant narratives in human evolution: "survival of the fittest" (physical strength) and "survival of the friendliest" (prosociality). While both played a role, ...

In A Nutshell A linguist argues that wit, humor, and wordplay helped drive human language evolution through sexual selection, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Archaeological research in the Middle East is revealing how a long-forgotten ancient civilisation used previously undiscovered ...

Is wit a sign of evolutionary fitness? A new study explores how "quick-wittedness" and ancient verb-noun compounds shaped the evolution of human grammar through sexual selection. Learn how "killjoys" ...

Why do we talk the way we do? It might trace back to when our ancient ancestors left the jungle for the open savanna. Somewhere between 5.3 million and 16 million years ago, Africa's landscapes ...

The Maltese language stands as one of the most distinctive and ancient languages in the world, representing a remarkable ...

The bones of our ancestors remain silent. So, how can we possibly imagine what our earliest languages sounded like? Paleoanthropologists study millions of years of fossil evidence to try and ...