For over 14 000 years, dogs have hunted with us, guarded livestock, herded sheep and, more recently, curled up beside us on the sofa. Along the way, they have become remarkably good at reading our gestures and picking up on our cues.

Now researchers think dogs might also help answer a much bigger question: how did humans become the only species capable of spoken language?

Dr Tamás Faragó, a bioacoustics researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, has spent nearly two decades studying how dogs communicate through sound. Through K9VocLearn, a five-year research project backed by EU funding, he and his team are now considering whether domestication changed the way dogs use their voices – and what that might reveal about the evolution of human speech.