A truly educational read! Words, idiolects, vocal expressions, onomatopoeias, icons, morphemes ... where does language come from, and why do people seem to be the only species with such advanced use of it? This is a history and a science fest in one. I had no idea how important iconic words are ... words that somehow connote what they resemble ... universal, foundational to human development, a bridge between lineages ... and still in regular use today. As with much of English language work, this one suffers from a focus on the Anglo, although the author tries to branch out. I also appreciated the critical take and openness on the limits of research. And the tear-down of Ekman's "universal" model of emotions! A history of humanity in vowels and voice well worth reading.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Steven Mithen’s The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved is a masterful exploration of one of humanity’s most profound mysteries: the evolution of language.

As a book reviewer with a penchant for captivating storytelling and unique insights, I found Mithen’s work to be a compelling blend of scientific rigor and engaging narrative.

Mithen, a renowned archaeologist, takes readers on an intellectual journey spanning millions of years, from the ape-like calls of our earliest ancestors to the complex languages we use today. 

One of the book’s strengths is its detailed account of the evolutionary milestones which have led to our modern language. Mithen explains how early humans transitioned from simple vocalizations to the intricate systems of communication we now take for granted.

Mithen’s interdisciplinary approach is both enlightening and accessible. He bridges gaps between various fields of study, offering readers a comprehensive understanding of how language evolved.

While the book is dense with information, Mithen’s lucid prose ensures it remains engaging. The book’s breadth and depth make it a seminal work in the field of linguistics and human evolution.

The Language Puzzle is a thought-provoking and meticulously researched book that offers a new standard account of the evolution of language. Mithen’s ability to weave together complex scientific concepts with engaging storytelling makes this a must-read for anyone interested in the origins of human communication.

Whether you’re a linguist, a historian, or simply a curious reader, this book will leave you with a deeper appreciation of the words we use every day.

An interesting book – tracing how we humans (possibly) acquired our modern language abilities.

There has been a belief that we might have a universal language gene. Noam Chomsky believed this was likely. But neuroscience has not found it, at least as yet. The diversity of the languages humans speak is astounding – there are over 7,000 languages in the world. 96% of the people though only speak 4% of these languages (280), with English & Mandarin being the most spoken. There are also several dialects – English alone has over 150. India has more than 19,000 languages and dialects spoken. There are several languages which are progressively being lost before being documented.

A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the language attributes the last common ancestor to humans and chimps potentially had. This is important to understand what part of our abilities are inherited. While chimps exhibit some levels of understanding, attempts to teach them modern language have largely failed. There is the famous case of Kanzi, the chimp, who had learnt hundreds of symbols and some level of human language. Nevertheless, as per the author, this can at best be considered to be at par with a 2-year old human child. It has been determined though that chimp calls do have similarity to words. A complex and gradual development of our vocal traits, brain and muscular control is believed to have got us our current language abilities. Iconic words (where the vocal closely associates with the meaning) mostly were the first (evolving abilities of our ancestors/chimp calls), with random words being added over time.

This is a very educational book written in an engaging style. While speculative, the author brings together the evidence we have from genes, fossils, body structures and historical records very well. Yuval Noah Harari argued that stories brought us together and made us powerful. Assuming that is right, modern language is a vital ingredient for creating those binding stories. At the same time, we also many times lose the intensity of the experience when using words, as thinkers such as J Krishnamurti have explained. A fascinating area!

My rating: 4.5 / 5.

The Language Puzzle is a fascinating layman accessible monograph on the development of communication, speech, and language systems throughout human history by anthropologist Dr. Steven Mithen. Due out 18th June 2024 from Hachette on their nonfiction Basic Books imprint, it's 544 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.

Big reveal to start with: the question of when and where actual language developed in humans is unanswerable, and this book doesn't come to any jaw-dropping new revelations. That being said, the author does a good job of covering a fairly astounding number of ancillary subjects, some quite complex, and does so in a manner which is (mostly) free of jargon or devolving into stilted inaccessible academic language.

It is, admittedly, a niche book but will definitely appeal to readers interested in cultural anthropology, language, and prehistory. This would make a good support text for classroom or library acquisition, for cultural anthropology and allied subjects, as well as a superlative read for those who are particularly interested in history, culture, and the arts.

The book is fully annotated throughout, and the chapter notes and bibliography will provide readers with many hours of further reading.

Four and a half stars. Deeply researched and engaging.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Very early in this book Mithen tells us that it addresses what has been called “the hardest problem in science”: how, when, and why language evolved.

Almost near the end of the book he says “I struggled for years [probably for years even before publication in 2006 of his previous book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body] to think and write about the evolution of language because there were so many different strands of evidence. Only when I imagined the challenge as a jigsaw puzzle, needing to find and assemble the frame and fragments, could I make progress.”

And so “puzzle” in his title has two meanings. (How words acquire more than one meaning is itself a puzzle that is addressed in this book.) The second meaning provides the organizing strategy for the book. Mithen’s “frames and fragments’’—the chapters in the book—present data, theories, methods, terminologies and findings from (get ready): linguistics (including computational evolutionary linguistics); psychology (mainly findings from the study of memory, perception, and attention); neuroscience (where does language come from in the brain); genetics (how have genes and environment interacted to enable linguistic capacities to develop and evolve); anthropology (for what it tells us about the social and cultural context of the evolution of language); paleoanthropology (how does the evolution of language graph onto what we know about human evolution); ethology (what can we learn from the behavior of monkeys and especially of apes, because they share a common ancestor with humans); philosophy (how language impacts perception and thought); and archaeology, Mithen’s academic specialty (what inferences can be drawn from artifacts and other “human debris.”)

The “frame” has two halves: an overview of human evolution; and what we know about language as of today. The other disciplines provide the “fragments.”

By telling us that language evolution is a puzzle with a frame and so many fragments Mithen easily dismisses old ideas about the evolution of language: that there are dedicated language centers or genes for language; or, crucially, that there is a such a thing as a universal grammar.

Even so, we need to learn about such things as the distinction between lexical words and grammatical words; the emergence of arbitrary and iconic words; the evolution of the rules of morphology and syntax; the role of prosody in the evolution of language; the four major word classes; the role of ideophones, positionals, and hierarchical phrase structure; the difference between dialects and idiolects; the uses of stops, nasals, fricatives and glides in spoken language; the limits on the number of words, clauses and especially embedded clauses that we can keep track of in a single spoken utterance; displacement; bigrams and trigrams; the iterated learning model; the language bottleneck; compositionality; object bias; cross-modal perception; concept boundaries; sentential complements; and the six layers of grammaticalization.

Most important we need to understand the difference between a generalized learning mechanism for the evolution of language and a dedicated language acquisition mechanism; the difference between the domain-specific and the cognitively fluid mind; and the essential role of metaphor in the development of language.

I am in awe of all the knowledge assembled here. (More than 600 citations in his bibliography; more than 500 notes—some of them short essays themselves! --in the text.) I also am grateful for the 17 well-conceived and well-designed figures in the book. They provide a much-needed rest; a pause to visualize what Mithen tells you so exhaustively in his text.

I admire Mithen’s bravery in drawing from so many different disciplines to construct his argument. Surely specialists in these disciplines will be eager to tear apart an archaeologist’s use of their work, no matter how carefully he has treated it. Surely they will agree with Mithen’s publisher who, Mithen tells us in his acknowledgments, originally “asked him to write a book about farming and acquiesced” when Mithen insisted on writing about the evolution of language instead. Mithen would have been on much safer ground as an archaeologist writing about that subject.

Surely specialists will notice Mithen’s frequent use of words and phrases like “suggests”; “may have”; “might be”; “appears to be”; “one might argue”; “might consider”; “perhaps”; “not unreasonable to suppose”; “we might suspect”; and “seems reasonable to conclude.” Will they accuse him of writing a “just so” story?

Then again, on a subject like this, where most of the conclusions must be inferred from a relatively and frustratingly scarce amount of evidence—NOBODY WAS THERE TO WITNESS THE EVENTS Mithen chronicles here—Mithen’s story convinces me. And if his story does not convince everyone who reads it, it will still be a necessary and rewarding read for anyone interested in the evolution of language.

An expert reviewer of The Singing Neanderthals said it “seems destined to become a landmark in the way experts and amateurs alike seek to understand the character and evolutionary importance of hominid and early human communication.” I expect that The Language Puzzle will be praised even more highly.

The only book on NetGalley that I plan to buy once it is published. The Language Puzzle is everything I've been searching for over the years. It give anatomical and anthropological data with facts! This dives into the world before modern humans. Steven Mithen uses easy to understand language to explain the complex theories we've all been waiting for.

The Language Puzzle by Steven Mithen was among my most anticipated 2024 releases. I usually don't get to read new releases until a few years later, so I was extremely grateful that I got approved for an ARC of this. Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, Basic Books for making that happen in exchange for my honest review 💜

The basic idea behind the book is that science is still not 100% sure how language originally came about, so the author figured if he pieced together the latest findings from archeology, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and genetics like a puzzle, he would get the complete picture and would probably arrive at a solution.

You can pick up this book even if you don't know anything about linguistics. It goes back to the very basics, down to what a phoneme or morpheme is. The same goes for other topics, their basics are all painstakingly described before we get into it: the prehistory of humans, the structure of the brain, etc. That actually made me ponder whether all that was necessary and maybe the book could have been shorter without these explanations (it's ~600 pages long). However, I understand that the author's concept required him to paint a comprehensive picture.

While I said you don't need to be an expert in any of the topics to understand the book, I think it helps if you're REALLY interested in linguistics and anthropology. Without that, I'm not sure how enjoyable an experience it would be.

I am, luckily, extremely invested in all these fields, so the whole ride was a fun and eye-opening one. I did enjoy certain chapters more than others because of where my interests lie. I liked the ones about how infants pick up language and how they figure out which of the things they hear are words (super interesting), and the one about the brain and how it processes language (I'm always fascinated by brain stuff).

All in all, this is mandatory for all the language/archeology geeks out there (even better if you're both) and for those who are ready to tackle a 600-page book that doesn't go easy on the science lingo and data. It is very rewarding if you give it a chance and stick with it!

• The arc got archieved before I got a chance to really sink my teeth into it but the 2 chapters I read reaffirmed my desire to read it. I'll look for a finished copy and continue reading it that way.

Mind-blowing. A combination of some of my favourite things: neanderthals, language and ancient history. This popular science book tackles everything from how language started to where it is now.

Have you ever wondered how language started? Did two or more people try to gesture that certain things should have a vocal word for it? How could they even communicate, ‘hey’s let’s discuss making meaningful sounds’? And then what, how did they agree on words? Was it convention or just a few words at a time? This stuff fascinates me.

Did we evolve from chimpanzees? Apparently yes. But how? How do you just get taller, change the way you walk, the way you talk??? How does your face change, the size and shape of your brain??

This book has taken me on a journey of the how and why this is possible, with an ongoing layer on how speech began, evolved, and still evolves. I’ve gone from trusting genetic breakthroughs and a firm understanding of evolution, to an in depth one that breaks down the categories that make it all possible. And these categories are…pieces of the Language Puzzle. This structure has made it so much easier to understand.

In order for language to be where it is today, we needed many puzzle pieces. If neanderthals migrated the way our earlier ancestors did, would their speech have evolved? Would they have not gone extinct? The answers are here.

It took some time to get my head around some preexisting biases, mostly around small changes over long periods of time that result in drastic differences. We sort of resemble chimpanzees but can we really change that much to become bipedal, to have different head and facial structures? I won’t bore you with my ponderings but it took a lot to accept it for myself. This book answered many of my nagging questions.

I think a lot of readers of this book will have different lightbulb moments as some categories/puzzle pieces make more sense than others. One of my favourites was brain shape and size. To give birth to young with relatively larger heads would hurt a lot, right? So, how to biologically get around that dilemma…the brain continues to develop after birth. With that being the case, it can change based on the current environment around them. No instinctive language needed, it learns on the go. That’s my only mini spoiler, the rest you’ll have to discover for yourself.

That was just one snippet of insight into the book. There are many potential puzzle pieces that may fascinate other readers: how do babies learn language, singers might be interested in how the shape of the throat, mouth, nose affect tone and speech (compared with those of our ancestors)? How does working as a group or learning a trade affect language? There needs to be a way to co-ordinate the hunt or make the weapons, right? English teachers and language learners might enjoy the evolution of grammar and how word meanings change over time and how distance affects languages. Like when does a dialect become a different language altogether?

I rate this book a full 5 stars as the level of amazement was well beyond anything I’ve read in the popular science category. There are only two things that could improve the book in my opinion. In the category chapters (not intro or final wrap up), sometimes it was unclear where the research of others stopped and the author’s conclusions began. Or in other words, ‘is this the old theory or the new?’. Also, even though it’s a bit basic or for kids…I kinda wanted to see the jigsaw puzzle at the end. Each puzzle piece was fully explained including how it relates to the other pieces. It’s just the title has a jigsaw in it, so I wanted one too.

Ps 311 pages plus citations and references. Don’t be put off by the page count!

Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What a great and interesting read!

Language is such a fascinating topic, which is why I was so eager to start this book and I wasn't disappointed. Of course we all learn about evolution and just how many millennia it took for humans to arrive at the place we are now, but it has never occurred to me just how many evolutionary changes had to happen for us to be to develop language at all - the neurons, the muscles, the brain capacity, the face shape.

The book is very well-researched, citing the work and studies of many different scientist, and you can immediately tell the author has a lot of experience in this field.

The narrative of the book as many different pieces being put together to complete a puzzle is very compelling. It takes you through the history of humankind, starting with the last common ancestor between humans and apes and established our understanding of language through archaeology, biology, linguistics and many other fields.

I personally found the subject of weaponry a bit extensive and repetitive, though the author has shown how vital it was for the evolution of language over the course of thousands of years. I would've loved even more focus on linguistics and different languages, as I found those parts the most interesting.

In my personal opinion, I think the book distinguishes itself from other popular science literature, because it was structured more like a research paper, which isn't a bad thing at all, but could make it difficult for engage with it. Still I would definitely recommend it to anybody with an interest in this topic, because there were so much new information and worthwhile details.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an eArc.

The Language Puzzle by Steven Mithen

Well-researched, informative and interesting book about evolution of language. I did enjoy a lot reading this book. It was easy to follow and understand. The author was not playing with difficult wordings.

We communicate with others by using different methods, language is one of it. The author also researched on our close relative - monkeys and apes. I also love reading the chapter that introducing how language is changing. This is the book that related to our daily lives which I truly enjoy!

Many thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for my copy.

Pub date: Jun 18, 2024

The idea of understanding and knowing how the human language evolved is super interisting to me. The book explains and talks about the authors beliefs about the birth of language (written, spoken and signaled) with the help of cientific reasearchs made in various areas. The narrative goes from all the humans before the Homo Sapiens to showing communication between other primates, like the chimpanzees, talks about the importance of fire for brain and language devolopment, how children learn to talk and a lot of other things. In general I found it interisting and liked to discover all this new information, but sometimes the narrative became a little dry and the explanations about more specific knowledge were not so easy to understand. But I liked and it give me many things to think over.

*Thank You Netgalley and Basic Books for the ARC*

Approachable and readable for everyone, Mithen takes us on a journey through history. It's the story of humanity and the way that human language evolved. Fantastic, full of interesting ideas, and a wonderful combination of archaeology, linguistics, and multiple other fields. Loved this!

Thanks to Netgalley and Basic Books for the advanced digital reader's copy (ARC) in exchange for an honest review!

I found the information interesting. Some of the explanations are clear; some are not. The book uses mostly plain language but I felt that it sometimes devolved into jargon. The book lacked any author’s journey, which to me is a big factor in liking a book. I did not find the writing that engaging but the information was compelling enough to keep me going through the book. Overall, it was well worth reading. Thank you to Netgalley and Basic Books for the advance reader copy.

This is a terrific book about language—its origins snd evolution, its biology and all its variations
It’s a model for how an academic topic can be made accessible and highly readable for a general audience