Twenty-five years ago, Pinker and Bloom [1] helped reinvigorate research on language evolution by arguing that language “shows signs of complex design for the communication of propositional structures, and the only explanation for the origin of organs with complex design is the process of natural selection.” Since then, empirical research has tested the assertions of (cross-cultural) universality, (cross-species) uniqueness, and (cross-domain) specificity underpinning this argument from design. Appearances aside, points of consensus have emerged. The existence of a core computational and neural substrate unique to language and/or humans is still debated, but it is widely agreed that: 1) human language performance overlaps with behaviors in other domains and species, and 2) such general, pre-existing capacities provided the context for language-specific evolution (e.g. [2]). This progress has not occurred in isolation. Evolutionary theory has also undergone a renovation in the past 25 years, leading to calls for a new, “extended” evolutionary synthesis [3]. Recognition of processes such as reciprocal causation (organisms as active agents in evolution), inclusive inheritance (more than just genes), and developmental bias (including phenotypic accommodation) is rendering it increasingly untenable to speak of natural selection as the only (i.e. both necessary and sufficient) explanation for complex “design.” Recent decades have also seen a shift in our understanding of human prehistory, which is no longer consistent with either a sudden, recent appearance of “modern” behavior or a naively progressive gradualism. Rather, key elements of the human adaptation emerged in a piecemeal fashion over millions of years [4] with putative markers of behavioral modernity appearing and disappearing in a context-dependent way over at least the past 200,000 years [5]. In this new reality, where context is key, past is prologue, and diverse evolutionary processes are recognized, historical detail becomes paramount. Arbib’s [6] Mirror System Hypothesis (MSH) currently provides one of the most explicit and detailed sequential accounts of language evolution. Moving forward, the neurobiological richness of the MSH could be complemented with a broader (cf. anthropological) evidential framework. One example is the MSH account of the transition from complex imitation to protospeech via pantomime and protosign. Perhaps because the utility of language seems so obvious to us, evolutionary scenarios do not always thoroughly develop the proposed