Fig. 1. Still from The World in Words.   Where does language come from? How did humans learn to speak?   To find the answers, the hosts of The World in Words podcast looked into the structure of our throats. They discovered with the help of Philip Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, that we are the only animals on Earth who, “have a common pathway for food, liquid, and air, which allows us basically to choke to death.” In essence, the composition of our throats don’t allow us to breathe and swallow at the same time.      It is because of the setup in our throat, consisting of the larynx and esophagus, that gives us the ability to make sounds and utter words. Because we developed a throat that can lead to our demise though, scientists believed there had to be something beneficial about the configuration of the throat that outweighed the dangers choking held. That something had to be speech. ...