Language evolution to revolution: the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children - the Romulus and Remus hypothesis
The paper proposes that a mutation slowing prefrontal cortex maturation in multiple children enabled the development of recursive language and Prefrontal Synthesis around 70,000 years ago.
bioRxiv · Jul 19, 2019Evolutionary Biology