One of the greatest mysteries about the development of Homo sapiens concerns the acquisition of what is arguably our most important skill: language.  It is regarded by many scientists as the single most critical faculty separating us from the other animals.  It is the attribute that allowed knowledge of discoveries such as tool-making to spread between peoples and across generations, to audiences far larger than those who might have seen something with their own eyes.  But how did our ancestors learn it?  Many questions in science can be answered, or at least investigated, by means of controlled experiments.  Answering the question of how a language is created on that basis would seem to be nearly impossible.

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