Fitch also sees language as having evolved in small groups of people with a high degree of relatedness.
Fitch is particularly sympathetic to music as a part of language evolution. He is not clear on whether song arose first or whether language and song differentiated from a common chanting or warbling (as G. Vico thought in the 18th century—oddly uncited here). Fitch also sees language as having evolved in small groups of people with a high degree of relatedness. Otherwise, he thinks, people would have had too many reasons to lie and conceal their intentions, and would not have developed a complex mode of conveying useful, reliable information. Of course people lie so much that a few humorists have held that language was invented for that purpose…but Fitch is probably right here.