Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the psychosocial development and cultural evolution of individual languages as well as the origins and development of human language itself. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in the related fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, universal grammar,and cognitive science.