Steven Mithen at Literary Hub:
How children learn language has long been of interest to those concerned with its evolution. The idea that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ has been promoted, which means the stages of child development on their way to adulthood replicate those of our human ancestors on their way to becoming modern humans. This idea has been applied to language acquisition and its evolution, but I’ve never been persuaded. It is intellectually problematic because our human ancestors were never ‘on their way’ to anywhere other than being themselves. My interest in language acquisition is different and twofold.
First, is language acquired by specialized mental processes that are dedicated to this task or learned by general-purpose processes used for a variety of learning tasks? Second, can we project the processes of language acquisition/learning that we observe in the present into the prehistoric past to gain insights about the evolution of language?
More here.