The “putting the baby down” hypothesis: Bipedalism, babbling, and baby slings

Abstract

My responses to the observations and criticisms of 26 commentaries focus on the coregulated and affective nature of initial mother/infant interactions, the relationship between motherese and emergent linguistic skills and its implication for hominin evolution, the plausibility of the “putting the baby down” hypothesis, and details about specific neurological substrates that may have formed the basis for the evolution of prelinguistic behaviors and, eventually, protolanguage.