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#659 Nick Chater & Morten Christiansen - The Language Game; Language as a Game of Charades

The Dissenter

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Is There a Time Machine for Language Evolution?

We don't know how long language has existed for, but perhaps several hundred thousand years. So there's a whole suite of skills that are required. And it seemed that we happened to have the right mix for language to be able to get going. It may be that if you ran it, if that hadn't happened, if you ran primary evolution forwards, so other branches would have produced something similar at some later point. But it's not that this could only ever happen in our species. It's just that someone had to get there first to happen to be us.

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