'A tour de force' Alice Roberts 'Wonderful ... A remarkably comprehensive biography of the
single most important thing we all share - language' Robin Dunbar The relationship between
language thought and culture is of concern to anyone with an interest in what it means to be
human. The Language Puzzle 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 6000 languages in the world and each of us knowing over 50 000
words. Drawing on the latest discoveries in archaeology linguistics psychology and
genetics Steven Mithen reconstructs the steps by which language evolved he explains how it
transformed the nature of thought and culture and how we talked our way out of the Stone Age
into the world of farming and swiftly into today's Digital Age. While this radical new work is
not shy to reject outdated ideas about language it builds bridges between disciplines to forge
a new synthesis for the evolution of language that will find widespread acceptance as a new
standard account for how humanity began.
