Data on extant species can offer insights for inferring ancient cognition but also faces limitations, theoretical and methodologically, but also in terms of interdisciplinary integration because they operate with different concepts.

In this paper, we assess to what extent experimental insights from extant species such as humans and great apes can be applied to extinct ones. We describe the role of experiments in comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology & experimental semiotics and what they can tell us.

Call for Papers here: sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/e...

how in all these systems, pragmatics, ambiguity and context play an important role in "meaning-making" and "communication" shifting away from a mono-modal code-model both for human language and animal communication, with implications for language evolution

in the description of languages themselves (e.g. the role of iconicity in language) + in experimental studies (e.g. emergence of structure in different modalities such as gesture, bodily communication, sign languages) + in comparisons of human lg with other animal communication systems +

Here I will pick just "one" thing the growing realisation of the importance of multimodality (and its interaction with pragmatics) such as in conceptions of language as a multimodally integrated system. This is reflected in descriptions of linguistic communication (e.g. gesture-speech integration) +

Kenny probably wins the prize for funniest sentence (about something that has actually happened) illustrating that the compositional nature of #language enables us to say things never uttered before
youtube.com/shorts/l6uFO...

One important aspect pointed out by Magdalena Wrembel: Multilingualism! Humans are naturally predisposed to learn multiple languages to a degree not found in other animals (who might learn to comprehend other systems used by different groups/species but much more limited, esp. In production)

A point made by several people is also that the question also reflects on positions of what is "innate" about language (emerges because genetically specified) and what emerged only through being emergent and scaffolded through cultural evolution and interaction

Theresa points out that unique shouldn't mean superior, every species has their own "unique" communication system and we should look at how ecological niches influence the emergence of what kind of system

One point that Neil made is that the question of course is what we mean by language (often people mean speech) and that we should look at the suite of building blocks of a multimodal language faculty. the suite has unique elements such as our ability to draw, potentially complex compositionality etc

But the combo is unique. Nikki makes an important point that language has become its own evolutionary system adapting to human minds/brains that evolves culturally and generates structure which seems to make it unique

I think one thing people agree on is that we need to know more about the ingredients and building blocks of language and then compare it to other human behaviours and animal behaviours. Theresa&Nikki stress that many(maybe all)building blocks are shared at least to some degree with different animals