No one has fully explained the evolutionary origin of human language ability. Many animal species have verbal and visual types of communication that are not true language:

Sometimes even complex animal communications can occur without conscious thought. This appears to be the case with even the most complex vocalizations of birds. Many birds begin to sing when the pineal gland detects the lengthening days of spring and produces less melatonin. Bird vocalization is an example of what scientists call a fixed action pattern. The birds sing when the environment stimulates them to do so. It does not occur to the birds that their response to the stimulus may make no sense, for example a mockingbird singing at night in the winter because artificial lights have produced a mistaken idea of day length. Birdsong is not considered language, since it involves no conscious thought.

In some cases, animal communications involve conscious concepts that may correspond to what we would call words. Vervet monkeys, for example, have different kinds of calls for aerial predators (such as raptors) and terrestrial predators (such as snakes), which evoke different kinds of responses (hiding down in the vegetation from the former, running away from the latter) in the hearers.

Human language represents an unprecedented level of complexity. Apes can make between 300 and 400 signs, at maximum, while a human child (when his or her brain is about the same size of those of nonhuman apes) knows at least 6,000 words. Human language always involves not just concrete concepts about immediate objects and events but abstract concepts as well (for example, the past or the future). True language also has a framework of grammar, which puts the concepts in relation to one another and into motion. All human languages, and no other forms of animal communication, have abstract words and grammar. The production of language apparently requires a large brain, particularly a large prefrontal cortex, which is unique to the genus Homo. An absolutely large brain, not just a relatively large one, is necessary for intelligence and language. The large brains of cetaceans allow complex communication. The expanded portions of the cetacean brain are different from those that have expanded during human evolution, and it is unclear whether their communication, however complex, contains the abstract elements of true language. . .

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