An article I wrote about the Evolang conference in Barcelona is available for free online at the BioScience site here. BioScience is the magazine of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Joint Attention is often thought to require catching another's eye and a willingness to look in the eye. It has long seemed to me that if we understood the origins of speech, we would better understand what it is that sets humanity apart ...

Some gestures stay in the mind as sharply as the most memorable phrase. Simone Pika has published a useful review of ape gestures in the First Language journal, "Gestures of apes and pre-linguistic human children: Similar or different?" (abstract here). I...