If I could talk to the animals

The language faculty, or better the apparent lack of anything quite like human language in other animals, is one of the most prominent phenomenon that Darwin’s theory of evolution has struggled to explain. Ever since Max Müller’s arguments for the language barrier in the 1860s, there have been heated debates about how natural selection could have produced human language, despite the famous attempt of the Société de Linguistique de Paris to ban such discussion in 1866. Darwin’s (1859) bold claim that each human psychological faculty was acquired by gradation seemed to imply that there should be closely related animals with some capacities that could be identified as language precursors. Indeed, Darwin himself wrote in a letter to Gray about Müller that: ‘‘I wish someone would keep a lot of the most noisy monkeys, half free and study the means of communication’’ (see Radick, 31). Little in fact was known about primate communication, and thus it was possible that the