The Language Puzzle (2024) by Steven Mithen

 Book Review

The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million Year Story of How Words Evolved (2024)

by Steven Mithen

   If you want to skip reading this book I can give you the ultimate thesis in a nutshell:

  "When you get right down to it, fully modern language got over the hump after humans managed to tame fire, which led to them sitting around a fire at night, and listening to one another talk.  The humans who were the best at telling stories around the campfire did better in the natural selection process and became the leaders of early humanity, leading to the development of modern, human language."

   Mithen really takes the long view- he is very serious about the six million year timeline, if only to emphasis how late in the game what we know as language actually developed.   Mithen pieces his story together using a variety of disciplines that typically operate in silos: archeology, genetics, linguistics and zoology.  His references to modern languages are mostly limited to their use as illustrations of shifts that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago, or deep characteristics of language that have been there from the beginning.  

  Even with the "this is going to be obsolete before its published" disclaimer that all popular authors writing about advances in genetic science give, the chapter related to genetics was particularly intriguing.  I think I had heard that we had managed to sequence a Neanderthals genome, but I certainly didn't know the things Mithen writes about how those differences influenced language development.  I gather, from this and other books, that even post-sequencing DNA genetics remains complicated because the way genes interact is complicated and it is highly unusual that you can trace anything to one exact gene.

I enjoyed the Audiobook because I actually got to hear all the different noises reference in the book instead of having to puzzle everything out on my own.