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380mostly relegated to the religious and cultural domains. As a result, musical ear and soundproduction (the ability to sing in tune) declined.• Choral singing tradition was still kept as a means for the unity of human groupsand cohesiveness, although without the initial crucial importance of pitch-basedreferential language as a vital part of communication the tradition of vocal polyphonystarted to decline. Individuals with better articulation were favored in the struggle forsurvival since the advance of articulated speech.• Although the elements of speech are present even in ape and monkey vocalsignals, the dramatic shift to the fully articulated speech happened much later in humanhistory.• Groups of archaic Homo sapiens, that left Africa about 2 million years ago,developed the new articulated form of language in different regions of the world and indifferent epochs. I suggest that the ancestors of East Asian, Australian Aboriginal andmost of the Native American populations shifted to the articulated speech earlier.Caucasoid and African populations shifted to the articulated speech later.• This difference in time of the shift to the articulated speech might be reflected inthe wide differences in distribution of traditions of vocal polyphony, in differences of theprevalence of stuttering, dyslexia and acquisition of phonological system in differentpopulations of the world.Therefore, according to the suggested model, Homo sapiens with human languageand cognition occurred in Africa on the basis of choral singing and pitch-based musicalcommunication before the wide dispersal of humans from that continent. Therefore,human cognition and language origins are monogenetic. As to articulated speech,although some phonetic elements obviously existed in pre-articulated pitch language, thedramatic shift to articulated speech happened in different regions, in different epochs, andby different strategies, after the wide dispersal of Homo sapiens (erectus) from Africa.Thus, speech origin seems to be polygenetic.