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RED HERRING. “In sum, these data illustrate the value of the comparative approach to speech evolution, and suggest that the reconfiguration of the human vocal tract has been overemphasized in recent discussions of language evolution.” https://lnkd.in/dTkGwcGB View in LinkedIn

OTHER DRIVERS. “The further discovery of a permanently descended larynx in several nonhuman species, which evolved convergently with that in humans, indicated that factors other than speech might select for such reconfiguration, and provided testable hypotheses for what these factors might have been.” https://lnkd.in/dTkGwcGB View in LinkedIn

OLD MYTH DEBUNKED. “The discovery of laryngeal lowering during vocalization in many mammals suggests that this is a primitive trait, already present long before humans diverged from chimpanzees.” https://lnkd.in/dTkGwcGB View in LinkedIn

HOMOLOGY VS ANALOGY. “These new data tell a cautionary tale: we must beware of considering any human trait unique without a thorough search among animals. More importantly they show the value of both homology and analogy in understanding the human capacity for speech.” https://lnkd.in/dTkGwcGB View in LinkedIn

ERRONEOUS PRESUMPTION. “Such a descended larynx was believed until recently to be uniquely human, and thus has been emphasized in many accounts of language evolution. New comparative data call this emphasis into question.” https://lnkd.in/dTkGwcGB View in LinkedIn

SEED BLACK HOLES. “An SMBH is born first as a much smaller seed BH, which then grows by accreting matter and merging with other BHs. Numerous studies have been devoted to explaining how and when these seed BHs and their host galaxies form.” (SMBH = supermassive black hole; BH = black hole). https://lnkd.in/dHcpNrnR View in LinkedIn

THE DESCENDING LARYNX. “A key factor in human speech production is our unusual vocal tract: we have a descended larynx, hyoid and tongue root which enable us to produce a greater diversity of formant frequencies patterns, and thus of speech sounds, than would be possible otherwise.” https://lnkd.in/dTkGwcGB View in LinkedIn

THE UNIVERSE AS A LABORATORY. “Luminous (optically selected) quasars at high redshift, thus offer the most direct constraint on the evolution of the first SMBHs and serve a unique laboratory to study the earliest phases of galaxy formation and evolution as well as the properties of the early Universe.” (SMBH = supermassive black hole). https://lnkd.in/dHcpNrnR View in LinkedIn

INTERWOVEN FUNCTIONALITY. “Teasing out the relative contributions of these various behavioral domains (including language) to prefrontal elaboration during evolution will likely be very difficult, in part because they almost surely all contributed as part of a complex adaptive system involving many aspects of human behavior.” https://lnkd.in/dvz_XvBp View in LinkedIn

UNKNOWN ORIGINS, “How these BHs formed in a relatively short time scale, already 12 Gyr ago in the early Universe (≲ 700–800 Myr; is still an open question.” (BH = black hole). https://lnkd.in/dHcpNrnR View in LinkedIn