Informed ruminations on the biological evolution of the human language capacity, the core of which, according to the latter-day Chomskyan paradigm known as the Minimalist Program, consists of a simple Merge operation for building up arbitrarily complex conceptual structures from simpler ones. The authors posit that language evolved primarily as an instrument not of communication but of internal thought, and that the crucial event was a small change in the brain "wiring" of African humans living ~80,000 years ago.