Patrick Trettenbrein and I wrote an eletter in reply to the great science review article by Arnon and colleagues (2025) that the field has been waiting for! science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

We argue, that “departing from our last common ancestor with nonhuman primates, the language system in humans might have been exapted from an already flexible pre-existing system.

🚨 Language connection FOUND in chimpanzees? 🧠🗣️ For years, scientists thought the key to human language was a fibre connection, missing in chimp brains. New high-res brain scans just changed the game. 👀🐒 📖 Read the full story: rdcu.be/el857 1/n 🧵👇

9/n Huge kudos to the EBC Consortium behind this work—sourcing naturally or unavoidably deceased primates from the field all across Africa, from sanctuaries and from zoos all across Europe. The future of language research lies in both the lab and the wild. 🧪🌿

Hey Arcuate freaks and geeks! I first contacted Erin Hecht in 2019. At the time, I was working on my PhD in France on communication correlates of homologous language regions in primates. But what about their interconnections? The article: rdcu.be/eifzU

Indeed for some reason I got hooked by the arcuate fascicle (or fasciculus). And Erin across the ocean knew about tractography in chimpanzees! At the same time, Bill Hopkins had behavioural data on the same chimpanzees! And Suhas Vijayakumar was an incredible help!