The Language Puzzle

Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved

De: Steven Mithen

Narrado por: Kerry Hutchinson

A top scholar reveals the most complete picture to date of how early human speech led to the languages we use today 

The invention of language began with the apelike calls of our earliest ancestors. Today, the world is home to thousands of complex languages. Yet exactly how, when, and why this evolution occurred has been one of the most enduring—and contentiously debated—questions in science. 

In The Language Puzzle, renowned archaeologist Steven Mithen puts forward a groundbreaking new account of the origins of language. Scientists have gained new insights into the first humans of 2.8 million years ago, and how numerous species flourished but only one, Homo sapiens, survives today. Drawing from this work and synthesizing research across archaeology, psychology, linguistics, genetics, and more, Mithen details a step-by-step explanation of how our human ancestors transitioned from apelike calls to words, and from words to language as we use it today. He explores how language shaped our cognition and vice versa; how metaphor advanced Homo sapiens’ ability to formulate abstract concepts, develop agriculture, and—ultimately—shape the world. The result is a master narrative that builds bridges between disciplines, stuns with its breadth and depth, and spans millennia of societal development.

Deeply researched and brilliantly told, The Language Puzzle marks a seminal understanding of the evolution of language.

©2024 Steven Mithen (P)2024 Basic Books

Not as substantive as I hoped

This book is well organized and well written, but not as substantive as I hoped. As an engineer, I live for that "ah-hah!" moment when the solution to a problem becomes clear. Like doing some algebra to derive a well-known physics equation. Or decrypting a hidden message. That's how solving a puzzle feels to me. This book oversells the state of evidence, and its author's theory.

We have evidence from archeology, anthropology, zoology, etc. It's clear human language fits in to the primate family tree as a shared trait. Like the peacock's tail it's a trait that's been heavily selected for and grown to dominate any good description of our species.

This book also talks about a well understood linguistic evolution pipeline where words begin as nouns and end up as part of the structure of speech.

Put these two pieces together and you have a kind of outline for the development of human language, from primate calls that refer to objects to full blown linguistic grammar. But this is very thin soup, and it doesn't feel very revolutionary to put these two facts side by side.

If you want to learn about our closest primate relatives, extant and extinct, read this book. If you've been a keen reader of science news for the past few decades, you can skip this book.