Abstract

Falk's hypothesis is attractive and seems to be supported by data from primatology and language acquisition literature. However, this etiological narrative presents a fairly low degree of plausibility, the result of two epistemological fallacies: an implicit reliance on a unilinear model of causality and the explicit belief that ontogeny is homologous to phylogeny. Although this attempt to retrace the early emergence of prelinguistic capacities in hominins falls short of producing a compelling argument, it does call attention to an aspect of linguistic behavior which may indeed have evolved under the pressure of nurturing constraints.