THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Human language is the foundation for modern culture and civilization, but where did it come from?

In a deeply original new theory of its emergence, Professor Madeleine Beekman shows that our sophisticated ability to communicate evolved to solve an existential problem for our ancestors: caring for hopelessly premature infants which we all were thanks to a narrow birth canal and the relatively enormous head that had to pass through it. This work of accessible popular science distills the story of our species down to a handful of genetic and morphological turning points evidenced by the timing of the descent of our larynx and tongue as revealed by the fossil record, models of runaway selection, whereby two traits quickly coevolve in a cycle of amplifying feedback, and the biologically unprecedented demands placed on mothers and caregivers roughly 200,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived on the scene. Madeleine Beekman is Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Behavioral Ecology Emerita at the University of Sydney, Australia. Mother Tongue was conceived on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She has held fellowships at Cornell, Stellenbosch University (South Africa), and the University of Wageningen (the Netherlands). The author of nearly 200 scientific articles, she is a member of the academic board of the oldest continuing scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.