A ‘Mic Drop’ on a Theory of Language Evolution

Put your fingertips against your throat and say “abracadabra.” (Don’t whisper; it won’t work. Feign a phone call if you have to.) You should feel a buzzing—that’s your vocal folds vibrating inside your larynx.

The larynx, also called the voice box, is where the trouble begins: Its location is, or was, supposed to be the key to language. Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors. And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient, , and sound like different words. That would mean that speech—and, therefore, language—couldn’t have evolved until the arrival of anatomically modern about 200,000 years ago (or, per a fossil discovery from 2017, about ). This line of thinking became known as laryngeal descent theory, or LDT.