Here's a case in which a dog, already knowing the name of more than a hundred objects, associated a previously unknown name with a previously unknown object. I

Here's a case in which a dog, already knowing the name of more than a hundred objects, associated a previously unknown name with a previously unknown object. I don't know if there are any controlled, replicated studies demonstrating this. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/world-smartest-dog-nova-special-shows-border-collie/story?id=12875750 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/world-smartest-dog-nova-sp... This would not imply a facility for language understanding and resoning to anything like the extent we have, but it is the sort of preliminary step that might have opened the door for language to evolve in our ancestors.