Language is central to what it means to be human. This book explains how the invention of words at 1.6 million years ago began the evolution of human language from the ape-like calls of our earliest ancestors to our capabilities of today, with over 6,000 languages in the world and most of us knowing and using over 50,000 words.
Archaeologist Steven Mithen pulls from recent discoveries in archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and genetics, to explain and reconstruct the steps by which language evolved.
“Understanding the origin of language has been described as the hardest problem in science,” Mithen points out. ”Some argue for a sudden emergence of language from a genetic mutation at 100,000 years ago, while others suggest phases of ‘protolanguage’ or a slow emergence of language over millions of years; some propose language evolved from singing, while other promote social bonding, storytelling, tool making a hunting; some cherry-pick a feature of language and claim its evolution was a transformative event, such as ‘displacement’ (the ability to talk about the future and the past) or ‘recursion’ (the way we can embed multiple clauses into a single utterance). No one seems to agree with anyone else.”
Mithen seeks to forge a synthesis between these conflicting ideas about the evolution of language that will find widespread acceptance as a new standard for how Homo sapiens emerged from Homo erectus.