IN THE BEGINNING WAS Aword. What was it and what others followed? Steven Mithen’s Language Puzzle seeks to solve this conundrum by rolling out the long-range guns: pre-historic archaeology, anthropology, primatology, and human evolution. The search for his linguistic quarry proves to be a catholic sift through humankind’s advent and our eventual, formative babbling and beyond.
From the outset, “taxonomic uncertainty” clouds the emergence and extinction of early hominin species. Some things we know: humans and chimpanzees last shared an ancestor 6 million years ago; in common with us, they use tools (e.g. sticks to bring termites out of mounds), walk on two legs,
