Human Evolution and Society

Communication is the key. Humans today are totally reliant on the accumulated knowledge and experience of the past. Without the past to draw on, we would misinterpret the world according to the limitations of our immediate senses and our instinctual reasoning. Language is therefore utterly essential to the state of being human. A developed language centre is necessary, as it has been discovered that if language is not used by a child by the age of puberty, then the brain develops in a different way. Because the language centre of the brain shrinks during one's teens, if linguistic skills are not exercised at all, there is a point after which language acquisition is severely impaired.