Editing Origin of language (section)

=== Putting-down-the-baby theory ===
According to [[Dean Falk]]'s "putting-down-the-baby" theory, vocal interactions between early hominid mothers and infants began a sequence of events that led, eventually, to human ancestors' earliest words.<ref name="Falk2004">{{Cite journal |last=Falk |first=D. |date=August 2004 |title=Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: whence motherese? |url=http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~johnson/COGS260/Falk2004.pdf |url-status=dead |journal=Behavioral and Brain Sciences |volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=491–583 |doi=10.1017/s0140525x04000111 |pmid=15773427 |s2cid=39547572 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140104205636/http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~johnson/COGS260/Falk2004.pdf |archive-date=4 January 2014 |access-date=4 January 2014}}</ref> The basic idea is that evolving human mothers, unlike their counterparts in other primates, could not move around and forage with their infants clinging onto their backs. Loss of fur in the human case left infants with no means of clinging on. Frequently, therefore, mothers had to put their babies down. As a result, these babies needed to be reassured that they were not being abandoned. Mothers responded by developing 'motherese'—an infant-directed communicative system embracing facial expressions, body language, touching, patting, caressing, laughter, tickling, and emotionally expressive contact calls. The argument is that language developed out of this interaction.<ref name="Falk2004" />

In ''[[The Mental and Social Life of Babies]]'', psychologist [[Kenneth Kaye]] noted that no usable adult language could have evolved without interactive communication between very young children and adults. "No symbolic system could have survived from one generation to the next if it could not have been easily acquired by young children under their normal conditions of social life."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kaye |first=K. |url=https://archive.org/details/mentalsociallife0000kaye_a5t8/page/186 |title=The Mental and Social Life of Babies |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=1982 |isbn=0-226-42848-6 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/mentalsociallife0000kaye_a5t8/page/186 186]}}</ref>