A new study of Claudio Brozzoli and his colleagues in IMPACT, in collaboration with the DDL lab (Lyon) and the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), supports the hypothesis of a coevolution of tool use and language by demonstrating common substrates in the basal ganglia and the existence of a cross-facilitation of learning.
This study was published in Science: Thibault, S., Py, R., Gervasi, A. M., Salemme, R., Koun, E., Lövden, M., Boulenger, V., Roy, A.C., Brozzoli, C. (2021). Tool use and language share syntactic processes and neural patterns in the basal ganglia. Science, 374(6569). doi: 10.1126/science.abe0874