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Humans cooperate with unrelated strangers at a scale no other primate approaches, and pay to punish defectors they will never meet again. The experiments behind that claim, and their sharpest critics, are less settled than they look.
Ochre engravings older than 70,000 years, shell beads pushed past 100,000, and a flute that might just be a hyena's leftovers. The dates in the ground are secure. The explanation for why any of it exists is not, and saying so precisely is the argument.
Humans wean their young almost twice as fast as chimpanzees, take five extra years to start reproducing, and then spend a third of adult life past fertility. Three rival explanations compete for that arithmetic, and none of them has won outright.
Pinker and Bloom priced grammar as an adaptation. Chomsky narrowed his own claim to recursion alone. A fieldworker says one language breaks it, and the "language gene" was a sampling artifact. The evidence is real, contested, and unresolved.