Steven Mithen - The Language Puzzle (Profile Books, 2024) ***

Maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe I missed some of the essence of this book, but it left me somewhat disappointed. Steven Mithen is a "British archaeologist. He is noted for his work on the evolution of language, music and intelligence, prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and the origins of farming. He is professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading" (Wikipedia). The title is an apt one, in which he brings all the current knowledge together as pieces of a huge puzzle: language among animals and especially apes, the evolution of the human brain, the evolution of culture and the need for communication, the nature of language, the physiology of speech and hearing, language to transcend the concrete world, etc. 

"As such, their lexicons had little impact on how they perceived the world. Modern humans used linguistic metaphors to explain and understand abstract concepts - ideas about other worlds and ancestral beings, notions of justice, identity and ownership. 

Such concepts could be assembled into new categories with no grounding in the world, which then eased the invention of learning, recall and explanation of further abstract concept that now had a category to sit within. Once the category of the supernatural was conceived, this provided a home for new concepts and their associated words, such as ghosts, spirits and spells. The lexicon continued to expand and stories took on new dimensions with complex plots, heroes and villains, magic, events and imaginary worlds. Storytelling became an art form for impressing, persuading, educating and entertaining by the skilful use of words. (p 388)

Many of these aspects are of course widely known, and it is of interest to see them all listed one after the other, yet there is no deeper insight than what was already known. The puzzle, once made, shows a picture that was already familiar, because not specific to language or its evolution. He misses a great deal of information on recent research in neuroscience on language. 

My son Tom did his PhD on the neurological origin of language, conducting brain scans to identify which types of words and even concepts were located in which part of the brain. Interestingly, it was not in the prefrontal cortex as many expected, but in the deeper part, the amygdala or the 'animal' part of the brain.