The Origin of Language: How we learned to speak and why

(Paperback)

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The Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney makes a radical, compelling new account of the origin of human language. It wasn't hunting or fighting or simply being smart that gave us language: it was caring for our kids.

Could the first words spoken by Homo sapiens have been hey, hold the baby! Madeleine Beekman, a visionary evolutionary biologist walks readers along a path through deep time that our forebears trod toward creating human language, populating the planet, and understanding the universe. Human accomplishments, all rooted in language, didn't come from supposedly male dominated activities like hunting or making war, their origin lies in a culture of caring, of looking after the weakest among us, our relatively helpless children.

Random mistakes made in the evolution of our DNA and chromosomes over the last hundreds of thousands of years made us have babies more prematurely than other hominids like Neanderthals and Denisovans (thanks narrow hips!). Caring for uniquely vulnerable babies required an entirely new, higher level of cooperation between adults or our species would perish. Darwin and other players in the history of science are on stage alongside the author as she builds her case.

This childcare problem led to the development of human language and in turn all our accomplishments. Even the large language model of intelligence ChatGPT makes an appearance. The argument overturns other explanations of the origin of language, civilisation and our species planetary dominance by greats such as Chomsky, Pinker, and Harari among many others. The verdict in this investigation is that culture of caring, not violence, has always been the secret of our success.

Author Bio

Madeleine Beekmanis professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia. In the academic year of 20202021, Beekman was a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), which is where the idea for The Origin of Language was born. She currently lives in Australias northern tropical rainforest with her husband, where she can observe the endangered cassowary from her office. She has two adult daughters.