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Lending a hand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Michael C. Corballis
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. m.corballis@auckland.ac.nz

Abstract

The precise manner in which language serves its communicative function suggests that natural selection, rather than exaptation or reappropriation, played the major role in its evolution. Natural selection is more readily invoked, I suggest, if it is assumed that language originated as a system of manual gestures, and later switched to an oral mode.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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