THE LANGUAGE PUZZLE

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.”