been shown to regulate language-like behaviours in birds, mice, and chimpanzees. These vocalizations aid in providing a communicative structure to social groups, such as identifying members, facilitating group movement, or signaling danger, but lack in grammatical or syntactic complexity. When human and chimpanzee lineages diverged 4.6-6.2 million years ago, the substitution of two amino acid changes in humans, from those in NHA, appear to contribute to the human ability of normal spoken language (Enard et. al, 2002).

Linguist Noam Chomsky, built upon this idea of a contributing genetic factor to human language suggesting “that our language is the result of the unfolding of a genetically determined program” which begins with an innate ability to understand grammatical structures, coined as “Universal Grammar” (Deacon, 1997). Chomsky suggests that “language acquisition devices” in developing brains aid children in navigating subject-object rules, appropriate syntax, and pragmatic semantics of all human languages. The appeal in the idea of Chomsky’s language “organ” is that it eliminates the discontinuity between human and NHA communication styles offering a single-step evolutionary account for the failure of other species in acquiring language, an ultimate discrepancy in separating humans from NHA. While parallels can be made between certain facets of linguistics between humans and NHA, such as learned dialects of birdsong with differing human vernaculars, these parallels exhibit a superficial resemblance to language learning in NHA and lack coordinated rules that exist within the human language system- the syntax, grammar, design, symbolism, and semantics- that drive our existence forward (Deacon, 1997).

The ability to ask the question “what is a human?” is only possible due to our harness on the complexity of language, a grip so developed that we can ask the question of our existence to ourselves. It is hard to imagine a bird reflecting on its inherent “birdness”, but our ability to question our existence drives our understanding of humanness, therefore suggesting that language is the key differentiating factor between humans and NHA.