A stimulating inquiry into the origins of language.”—Publishers Weekly
“An expert education into 'the most fundamental aspect of the modern mind.'”—Kirkus
“Mithen’s book is engaging, detailed, and incredibly thorough — and brings a fresh and welcome perspective to a longstanding puzzle.” —Undark
“A groundbreaking exploration of language’s origins.” —Indulge Magazine
“The Language Puzzle is well written and full of interesting ideas set out in an accessible way.”
—Mapping Ignorance
“How humans acquired their most important and mysterious mental skill remains a fascinating mystery. Steven Mithen describes the leading clues from diverse sources so clearly that The Language Puzzle is a sleuth’s equivalent to one-stop shopping. The origin of language is beginning to look like a solvable problem.”—Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire
“An authoritative, dense, yet accessible synthesis, The Language Puzzle is a superbly up-to-date guide to the complex and variegated evolution of language. Encompassing a huge and multidisciplinary scope of knowledge and covering some five million years, this fascinating book shows that asking how and why we came to speak also means exploring what it is to be human.”—Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred
“A fascinating history of ideas and a masterful synthesis of the latest insights from linguistics, archaeology, genetics, neuroscience, and AI—providing us with a compelling theory of the evolution of language. The Language Puzzle is a tour de force.”—Alice Roberts, author of Ancestors
“Relating the evolution of the human lineage while attempting to integrate linguistics, genetics, archeology, and semiotics in proposing a holistic explanation for language evolution is no small task. However, in this remarkably accessible narrative, Mithen weaves a thoughtful and engaging account across time, bodies, places, and materials. Whether or not one agrees, in total or in part, with the assumptions and assertions in the book, it offers a bounty of valuable insights and has much to teach us all.”—Agustín Fuentes, author of The Creative Spark
“A remarkably comprehensive biography of the single most important thing we all share—language—written with Mithen’s wonderful ability to combine deep insights with a story engagingly told.”—Robin Dunbar, author of Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
“Mithen’s book The Language Puzzle addresses when, why, and in which hominins nascent linguistic abilities emerged and how, over vast amounts of time, they evolved into language as we know it. Chapter by chapter, Mithen gleans relevant clues—he calls them fragments or puzzle pieces—from fossil hominins, genetics, comparative anatomy, brain evolution, evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), the archaeological record of stone tools and art, and much more. Fragments about linguistics, for example, suggest that the evolution of language had its roots in apelike vocalizations that paved the way for the subsequent invention of various kinds of words, grammar, and, ultimately, abstract language and thought. Intriguingly, Mithen uses the puzzle pieces to attribute different levels of linguistic development to various hominin species and then draws parallels with the cognitive skills each species likely used to produce their kinds of stone tools and (where applicable) art. However, Mithen keeps the reader deliciously hanging on until the end, when he finally assembles all of the puzzle pieces into a big picture that spells out the different levels of linguistic accomplishment of australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens. (You’ll need to read the book to find out which one is credited with developing the first true language.) Not only is The Language Puzzle extremely readable, it is also an epic achievement that, more than any other book out there, rises to the challenge of elucidating the immense complexity that underpinned the emergence and evolution of human language.”—Dean Falk, author of Finding Our Tongues
★ 06/01/2024
Archaeologist Mithen (early prehistory, Univ. of Reading; Land of the Ilich) casts a wide, scholarly net in this account of how human evolution and the "ratchet effect" (one development leading to another) took society from grunts to cuneiform tablets to today's use of computational evolutionary linguistics for studying language development. He presents so much material and multidisciplinary research that readers might feel a little overwhelmed at first, but most will find it reassuring that it is all here. Readers may want to focus on the "kiss-squeaks" and "travel hoos" of apes; the anatomical features of word formation in humans; the political implications of language usage; or, perhaps most remarkable of all, the miracle of how children learn to speak. Helpful charts and illustrations enhance the clarity of Mithen's explanations. But he is also willing to consider alternative explanations for things and does so without being dismissive. His enthusiasm for words is evident in his engaged and accessible writing style. VERDICT A brilliant, generous, expansive, and joyful book about the evolution of language.—Ellen Gilbert
2024-03-15
Readers of this book likely know at least 50,000 words and speak around 16,000 every day. Mithen provides the story of how they came to do it.
Language, like history or biology, is a massive field of study, and a one-volume overview is no mean feat. Mithen, a professor of early prehistory and author of The Singing Neanderthal, combines lucid prose with a lifetime of experience in this compendious exploration of linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, geography, genetics, and philosophy. The author explains that modern languages (there are around 7,000) arrange words into “meaningful utterances using rules to modify and place them into a particular order.” Without languages, we would still be living as Stone Age hunter-gatherers. “Unlike toolmaking, walking on two legs, and complex patterns of social relations,” writes Mithen, “language has remained stubbornly aloof from the primate world, becoming the last bastion of human uniqueness.” The term miraculous, a shopworn word in science writing, remains a universally accepted description of how infants learn one or even several languages perfectly in a few years. Adults find it much harder. Raised as human children, even the most brilliant chimpanzee never attains the proficiency of a 2-year-old human. In 15 lengthy chapters, the author explores such a wide range of topics that the book serves well as a popular, definitely not dumbed-down account of human evolution. Some chapters—e.g., on primate communication, or the vocal tract—contain more information than many readers may want to know. Others (fire, toolmaking) are informative, despite covering areas well served by entire books. Dramatic advances in neuroscience and genetics haven’t turned up a brain area or genes specific for language, but there is no doubt that the words we use influence how we perceive the world.
An expert education into “the most fundamental aspect of the modern mind.
