Recursive processing of variable-length structures continues to be regarded as a hall- mark of human cognition. In the last decade, a firefight in the linguistics community staked several leaders of the field against one another. At issue was whether recursive processing is the “uniquely human” evolutionary innovation that enables language and is specialized to language, a view supported by Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky (Fitch et al., 2005), or whether multiple new adaptations are responsible for human language evolution and recursive pro- cessing predates language (Jackendoff and Pinker, 2005).
from here
Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. Merge operation as basis for our language (Linguistics, Noam Chomsky)