Interacting primates: the biological roots of human communication

The most striking aspect of human communication – and also the one that attracts most of the attention – is certainly language. Language is a complex, adaptive and multimodal communicative system requiring the convergence and integration of multiple mechan-isms (Fitch 2010; Levinson & Holler 2014). Several theories have been proposed to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways that led to this complex human trait, but a unifying framework is still lacking (Christiansen & Kirby 2003). In this volume, Meguerditchian (2022) contributes to the debate on the gestural origins of language by providing a review on baboons’ manual and body gestures that have been shown to share key properties of language. Among these, Meguerditchian (2022) also focuses on later-alisation and hemispheric specialisation in the baboon brain. Concerning the neural basis of primate communication, Sliwa et al. (2022) present evidence that primates possess specialised neural pathways coordinating a diverse range of communication systems for organising their complex kin and friendship bonds.