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In the reading in Dennett for this week he has been talking a lot about the evolution of language and how it must be an evolutionary process while pointing to Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist, and showing how he does not believe that language was a product of evolution. This all brought to mind a lecture I heard several years ago given by Dean Falk on her "putting the baby down" hypothesis for the evolution of language. The theory in a nutshell and as well as I remember it was that when human women started having to put their children down as they worked  because human babies could not be born with the same motor skills as chimp babies to hold on to their mother themselves. According to the theory speech started as a way to reassure the children about the physical presesence of their mother and also so the child would have ways of communicating their own needs to the mother. This theory made a lot of sense to me as to how language started although it has obviously diversified from its original purpose, the capability to communicate well enough to keep your children safe does seem like it would be a pretty effective selector for speech in the first place.