Timed to co-incide with Marieke Schouwstra’s PhD defense, there will be a workshop on investigating protolanguage at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands on the 30th November. Here’s the blurb:
What did language look like in the early stages of language evolution? Recently, researchers have started to investigate this question in the lab, using human participants. From these experiments, conclusions have been formulated about the properties of protolanguage (an intermediate stage in the emergence of human language). What are the different accounts of protolanguage? And does it make sense to talk about an intermediate stage in the emergence of language?
More information here:
http://www.phil.uu.nl/~mariekes/workshop-protolanguage/index.html