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At this point of development, the communication is done via release of chemical factors which bind to other cells and cause changes. The general problem of pattern formation in embryonic development has been extensively studied; see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_formation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys...

I'm oversimplifying, bjut it's basically the gradient of a chemical that acts as a control variable.

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The associated paper to the article is:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.137...

p.15 has a summary of what they propose, e.g., density of p21+ chondrocytes, as an inhibitor:

"Because we found that the extent of compensatory proliferation does not linearly correlate with cell density—but it does with the proportion of p21+ chondrocytes — we posit that density plays a permissive rather than an instructive role and that stress signals emanating from p21+ chondrocytes are needed as well."

that's text I can't interpret, unfortunately. It's highly speculative and ambiguous.

Recently there's been some conjecture that bioelectricity guides embryonic development as well: https://www.quantamagazine.org/brainless-embryos-suggest-bio...

From a layman's perspective, there are some really exciting developments happening in the field of morphogenesis!

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