How and Why Humans Started Speaking

History Unplugged Podcast

Most people know at least 50,000 words and speak around 16,000 per day. We speak between 120 and 200 words per minute and read them at twice that speed. We invent word games like crosswords, Scrabble, and Wordle, and we are constantly adding new terminology and slang to our dictionaries. Our love of words is no secret, but how we evolved to acquire so many words and manipulate them into complex thoughts is one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Today’s guest is Steven Mithen, author of “The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. “ He explores evidence from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, genetics, and archaeology to unearth new theories about the origins of language.
Beginning with an overview of human evolution during which language evolved, The Language Puzzle looks to our distant ape and monkey relatives to see what their vocalizations can tell us about the foundations of language in our earliest ancestors. Mithen analyzes fossil evidence to explain what we can glean from changes in humans’ vocal tracts over time, and the linguistic implications from how our ancestors made stone tools.