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Ritual/Speech Coevolution
The ritual/speech coevolution theory was originally proposed by social anthropologist Roy Rappaport before being elaborated by anthropologists such as Chris Knight, Jerome Lewis, Nick Enfield, Camilla Power and Ian Watts. Cognitive scientist and robotics engineer Luc Steels is another prominent supporter of this general approach, as is biological anthropologist/neuroscientist Terrence Deacon. These scholars argue that there can be no such thing as a 'theory of the origins of language'. This is because language is not a separate adaptation but an internal aspect of something much wider—namely, human symbolic culture as a whole.

Attempts to explain language independently of this wider context have spectacularly been inconclusive, say these scientists, because they are addressing a question with no definitive answer. As anthropology is mostly guesswork, trying to explain the rituals can be difficult because it is common to use analogies that compare to modern society. One example of this is would be If a future historian were trying to explain emergence of credit cards, they may have difficulty connecting the card to currency and their part in the modern economy. Using a credit card makes sense only if you have a bank account institutionally recognized within a certain kind of advanced capitalist society. In much the same way, language would not work outside a specific array of social mechanisms and institutions. For example, it would not work for an ape to try using verbal language  in order to communicate with others in the wild. One incident that is often cited is when an adolescent male baboon approached by malicious-looking older apes. The adolescent baboon stood up to indicate a predator was behind the older apes causing them to look back, allowing him to escape. This is the equivalent to the verbal phrase “made you look” that the adolescent baboon employed. This nonverbal communication in the wild highlights the lack of verbal communication between these animals.

As pure social conventions, signals of this kind cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world — they are a theoretical impossibility. Being intrinsically unreliable, language works only if you can build up a reputation for trustworthiness within a certain kind of society—namely, one where symbolic cultural facts (sometimes called 'institutional facts') can be established and maintained through collective social endorsement. In any hunter-gatherer society, the basic mechanism for establishing trust in symbolic cultural facts is collective ritual. Therefore, the task facing researchers into the origins of language is more multidisciplinary than is usually supposed. It involves addressing the evolutionary emergence of human symbolic culture as a whole, with language an important but subsidiary component.

Critics of the theory include Noam Chomsky, who terms it the 'non-existence' hypothesis—a denial of the very existence of language as an object of study for natural science. Chomsky's own theory is that language emerged in an instant and in perfect form, prompting his critics in turn to retort that only something that does not exist—a theoretical construct or convenient scientific fiction—could possibly emerge in such a miraculous way. The controversy remains unresolved.

Ritual Burials
The practice of ritual burials emerged around 100,000 years ago, during which time it is believed that language began to emerge. While grave sites differed in appearance and style, some with multiple bodies interlinked and some with additions of beads, it is thought that symbolic thought was used during the burial process as it shows effort was put into caring for the already dead. In an ancient grave, a mother and son were found buried together, the ritual burial shows potential for an understanding of full theory of mind and comprehension of emotions. In addition, this displays that early modern humans were able to think about a life beyond their own, an indication of the development of both language and ritual among early modern society.

Jewelry
Traces or full pieces of ancient jewelry, specifically shell beads, can be traced back to the time of early modern humans. It is widely believed that that a specific type of shell was used for necklaces and other adornments and that these shells were traded among early modern human groups. The trading and exchange of jewelry is theorized to have aided the emergence of language out of necessity to communicate.