Ape laughter reveals 15-million-year evolutionary link to human speech

In the laughter of tickled gorillas, scientists have found an echo of something ancient — the rhythmic architecture of human speech itself. A study published in Communications Biology traces the temporal patterns of ape vocalizations and finds them governed by the same structural rules that organize human syllables and sentences, suggesting that vocal flexibility was not invented by our species but inherited across a lineage stretching back fifteen million years. The question of how language began shifts, in light of this, from a search for a singular origin to a meditation on gradual becoming