Peter Bellwood is at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia. Nowadays, about 80 Transeurasian languages ...

Dolphins name one another, and they click and whistle about their lives or the dangers posed by sharks and humans. They also pass on useful bits of know-how from mother to child, such as how to catch ...

OF all the great changes in thought which the present century has witnessed, perhaps none is more striking than that which has occurred in our methods of studying the beginnings of human culture. The ...

Rosina Lozano, associate professor of history, researches Latino history with a focus on Mexican American history, the American West, migration and immigration, and comparative studies in race and ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

What is the origin of language? When I was a kid, I was told that Sanskrit — which originated in India — was “the mother of all languages,” including English and most European languages. Not any more, ...

Languages as diverse as English, Russian and Hindi can trace their roots back more than 8,000 years to Anatolia — now in modern-day Turkey. That's the conclusion of a study that assessed 103 ancient ...

Every boring email we type or moment of small talk we have at the grocery store is part of a historic and mysterious legacy: the creation of language. The kind of languages we speak — from Arabic to ...

How did language begin? Words don't leave artifacts behind — writing began long after language did — so theories of language origins have generally been based on hunches. For centuries there had been ...

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a long-standing problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages. The family ...