The Language Puzzle

A tour de force of terse, fascinating clarity... A remarkable, vivid set piece: a montage that runs from the barks and coos of forest-dwelling primates to the grammatical written language you are reading now -- Dennis Duncan * The New York Times * Wonderfully evocative ... A highly original view of our musical origins * Guardian * Takes the reader on a whirlwind journey through many disparate disciplines, generously dispersing interesting tidbits and ideas along the way -- Sarah Wild * TLS * The most perspicacious portrait of the role of communication among our remote predecessors that I have ever encountered ... A landmark book * New York Review of Books * Mithen's detailed and engaging book, with its laser-like focus on the role of language, offers a fresh perspective on the human story * Smithsonian Magazine * The Language Puzzle is a notable piece of scholarship that deserves to take a prominent place in the literature of the origins and evolution of language * The Critic * Mithen's enthusiasm for words is apparent on every page of this excellent book... an easy, delightful reading experience * Library Journal * 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, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at University of Birmingham and author * Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials * 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 ... keeps the reader deliciously hanging on -- Dean Falk, Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University and author * The Fossil Chronicles * 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, anthropologist and author * Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships * 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 5 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, archaeologist and author * Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art * 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 -- Agustn Fuentes, author * The Creative Spark * 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 * Catching Fire * The enduring mystery of how humans learned to speak [is] a romantic tale -- Anjana Ahuja * FT * Extraordinary ... a page-turning dive into the mysteries of human communication * Buzz * Mithen ... combines lucid prose with a lifetime of experience in this compendious exploration of linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, geography, genetics, and philosophy ... An expert education into "the mos

Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. He previously studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Universities of Sheffield, York and Cambridge, before joining the University of Reading. An award-winning archaeologist, Steven Mithen specialises in prehistoric hunter-gatherers and the earliest Neolithic farmers, with long-term field projects in southern Jordan and western Scotland. He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, New Scientist and the Guardian and has authored over 200 academic articles and books, including The Singing Neanderthals and After the Ice. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.