The problem is that after looking for a considerable amount of time and with a wide range of methodological approaches, we cannot seem to find anything unique in ourselves—either in the human genome or in the human brain—that explains language.
Luckily, just a few years later, scholars from different disciplines began to grapple with the question in earnest. The early days of serious research in language evolution unearthed a perplexing paradox: Language is plainly, obviously, uniquely human. It consists of wildly complicated interconnecting sets of rules for combining sounds and words and sentences to create meaning. If other animals had a system that was the same, we would likely recognize it. The problem is that after looking for a considerable amount of time and with a wide range of methodological approaches, we cannot seem to find anything unique in ourselves—either in the human genome or in the human brain—that explains language.