>“spoken language” is actually not something inherent and instinctual to humans I agree, as you say until you reach the point where newborns are already surrou

>“spoken language” is actually not something inherent and instinctual to humans I agree, as you say until you reach the point where newborns are already surrounded by it. >It’s just a technology that’s rather simple to learn, if you have the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a cerebral cortex)—and, crucially, a teacher. No teacher needed whatsoever quite often, but maybe so usually, so I can not say crucial. >And I hypothesize that that is what happened (pre)historically: at some point, there were several memetic “waves” spreading increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g. syntactic, expressive) forms of language across human populations with brains already structurally amenable to them. Of course, each wave would only be a struggle to the generation that pioneered it; the next generation, being immersed in that new, more-complex language form from birth, would find it similarly intuitive. The evolution of more expressive vocalizations might have been required along these lines for us to reach where we always thought modern man was to begin with.