Unlike any other species, humans can learn and use language. In his book How the Brain Got Language,  Michael A. Arbib explains how the brain evolved to make language possible. “Mirror System Hypothesis”.believe that because of mirror neurons, monkeys, chimps, and humans can learn by imitation, but only “complex imitation,” which humans exhibit, is powerful enough to support the breakthrough to language. This theory provides a path from the openness of manual gestures, which we share with nonhuman primates, through the complex imitation of manual skills, pantomime, proposing (communication-based on conventionalized manual gestures), and finally to proto-speech. The theory explains why we humans are as capable of learning sign languages as we are of learning to speak. This book shows how cultural evolution took over from biological evolution for the transition from protolanguage to fully-fledged languages. The book explains how the brain mechanisms that made the original emergence of languages possible, perhaps 100,000 years ago, are still operative today in the way children acquire language, in the way that new sign languages have emerged in recent decades, and in the historical processes of language change on a time scale from decades to centuries.