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The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age by Steven Mithen

The Language Puzzle explains how the invention of words at 1.6 million years ago began the evolution of human language from the ape-like calls of our earliest ancestors to our capabilities of today, with over 6000 languages in the world and each of us knowing over 50,000 words.

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Drawing on the latest discoveries in archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and genetics, Steven Mithen reconstructs the steps by which language evolved; he explains how it transformed the nature of thought and culture, and how we talked our way out of the Stone Age into the world of farming and swiftly into today's Digital Age. While this radical new work is not shy to reject outdated ideas about language, it builds bridges between disciplines to forge a new synthesis for the evolution of language that will find widespread acceptance as a new standard account for how humanity began.
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    • PatrickOBeirne ,
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    @appassionato @bookstodon
    1.6M years? His previous book "The Singing Neanderthals " dated symbol manipulation on which language depends to, I think, 200,000 years ago.

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