Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors. And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient to speech because it enabled its bearers to produce a variety of distinctive vowels, like the ones that make beet, bat, and boot sound like different words. That would mean that speech—and, therefore, language—couldn’t have evolved until the arrival of anatomically modern Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago