Language is probably the most important point of distinction between humans and all other animals: no animal has anything quite like it. Language is intimately

Language is probably the most important point of distinction between humans and all other animals: no animal has anything quite like it. Language is intimately connected with symbolic reasoning, and enabled the social coordination and shared learning that underlays our contemporary technology and success. But where does language come from? Researching language is very difficult, however, due to the ethical issues of researching human cognition and the difficulty of studying socially learned behaviors of WEIRD college students in contrast to hunter-gatherer infants. So you have had people trying to reason from the examples of severely brain-damaged adults, horrifically abused children, or experiments conducted by temporarily paralyzing peoples' brains. The amazing thing about NSL is that it is a well-documented example of linguogenesis: A non-linguistic human community essentially developed a new language and developed it to a high degree of sophistication within a scant few generations. This is not merely creolization, or something that was discovered after the fact. People have been able to document the increasing sophistication of the grammar with every class.