What do apes, aliens, and robots have in common? They all rank among the 
topics that evolutionary linguists study in their interdisciplinary 
endeavor to shed light on the evolutionary development of language. The 
social, cognitive and communicative capacities of nonhuman primates 
offer a fascinating avenue for investigations of the evolutionary 
platform on which human language is built. Experimental studies on the 
cultural transmission of “alien languages” in the laboratory provide us 
with insights how linguistic structure emerges over time. Work in 
robotics, AI and computational modelling shows how structured 
communication systems can be implemented in embodied agents and how 
these systems evolve over time. These and other research avenues 
contribute to the mosaic of language evolution that evolutionary 
linguistics try to uncover. In other words, all these lines of evidence 
help us to establish how we became “language-ready” over the course of 
human evolution. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to 
language evolution research. More specifically, I will talk about some 
of the most important lines of inquiry that are relevant to answering 
the following questions: What are the social and cognitive foundations 
of language-readiness? And what can we say about the evolution of these 
social and cognitive-foundations?