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"The right theory" was pointed out to me by Steven Pinker's Language Instinct. There would have been languageless chimps five to seven million years ago, with a family tree which looks more like frozen ice patterns, with some twigs of the tree dying out, either with some rudimentary phonation, some evolving into humanoids, and some not. "Lineages of individual organisms in a bushy family tree". So: the wrong theory: dinosaurs, anteaters, monkeys, chimpanzees, homo sapiens.