Reclaiming origins, reframing evolution: Language origin is distinct from language evolution

Through language, humans conceive and convey infinitely possible messages, yet the emergence of language’s generative power remains controversial. Computational/mechanistic and functional/ecological schools dispute whether natural selection can explain language evolution, in part because they address different Tinbergen questions and in part because both reconstruct evolution retrospectively in the image of modern humans. This review re-evaluates the debate and separates pre-origin from post-origin phases to show that evolutionary causes lie in the former, not the latter, and thus are irrecoverable retrospectively. Language evolution must be understood as a hominid phenomenon; however, distinguishing the two phases yields a multidimensional framework for mapping the evolutionary likelihood of generativity across ecologies and biologies to determine whether language could also lie in the solution space of other species.