The Language Puzzle

Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. He previously studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Universities of Sheffield, York and Cambridge, before joining the University of Reading. An award-winning archaeologist, Steven Mithen specialises in prehistoric hunter-gatherers and the earliest Neolithic farmers, with long-term field projects in southern Jordan and western Scotland. He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, New Scientist and the Guardian and has authored over 200 academic articles and books, including The Singing Neanderthals and After the Ice. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.

A fascinating history of ideas and a masterful synthesis of the latest insights from linguistics, archaeology, genetics, neuroscience and AI - providing us with a compelling theory of the evolution of language. The Language Puzzle is a tour de force
An epic achievement that, more than any other book out there, rises to the challenge of elucidating the immense complexity that underpinned the emergence and evolution of human language ... keeps the reader deliciously hanging on
A remarkably comprehensive biography of the single most important thing we all share - language - written with Mithen's wonderful ability to combine deep insights with a story engagingly told
An authoritative, dense yet accessible synthesis, The Language Puzzle is a superbly up-to-date guide to the complex and variegated evolution of language. Encompassing a huge and multidisciplinary scope of knowledge and covering some 5 million years, this fascinating book shows that asking how and why we came to speak also means exploring what it is to be human
Praise for The Singing Neanderthals:'Illuminating and thought-provoking
The most perspicacious portrait of the role of communication among our remote predecessors that I have ever encountered ... A landmark book
Wonderfully evocative ... A highly original view of our musical origins
A book that has you making up your own theories about how grunts became speech and songs