Synopsis

I focus on central points of controversy, including (i) how ancient language is, and whether or not Neanderthals and other species had some form of language; (ii) whether language evolved gradually and incrementally, through stages, or suddenly, in one leap, in all its complexity; and (iii) whether or not language evolution involves genetic changes and natural selection, or just cultural evolution. All these (and other) issues are being hotly debated today by scholars, who offer a spectrum of different approaches. I look at several key proposals and evaluate them with respect to how successfully they address the following challenges regularly encountered in language evolution studies (henceforth, the Five Problems): (i) identification of the initial stage(s) of language (the Decomposition Problem); (ii) the genetic bases for language (the Selection Problem); (iii) the language-brain-genes linkage (the Loop Problem); (iv) compatibility with the parameters of language variation and change (the Variation Problem); and (v) grounding in linguistic theory and analysis (the Theoretical Grounding Problem).