Abstract

What is language? What turned language into what it is? How is it orga-nized? And why is complex language peculiar to humans? Considering funda-mental scientific insights into the origin of life, the picture of these questions is comparatively blurred. However, these global issues have experienced a renaissance in recent years, given considerable advances and discoveries in cognitive science. These efforts created new solutions and new methods for the origins and evolution of human language within the specific sciences. Nevertheless, possibly the most important point of concurrence among researchers is that language evolution research must be cross-disciplinary in order to cope with the complexity of language evolution and provide sufficient constraints on theorizing to make it a legitimate scientific enquiry (cf. Christiansen & Kirby 2003 for a general review, see also Bickerton