Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution

The human imagination never ceases to be captivated by the quest for its own roots. Who were our ancestors? In the evolutionary clash of brains and brawn, what was it that prevailed and made us, Homo sapiens, uniquely human? Today scientists cite language as the distinctively human feature. But what is language—a sign, a grunt? a sound with collective symbolic meaning? This remarkable book seeks to set the record straight with a critical refinement of the language theory, providing us for the first time with a scientific explanation of how Eve came to speak at all.

Wrestling with the age-old question of why such a large gulf exists between humans and other animals, Philip Lieberman mines both the fossil record and modern neuroscientific techniques to chart the development of the anatomy and brain mechanisms necessary for human language as we know it. Eschewing any notion of a language gene or instinct, he pursues instead an evolutionary path in which environment acts on a biological capacity to reveal the interconnectedness of systems that make us most human: precise motor skills, speech, language, and complex thought. Eve Spoke challenges the dominant scientific theories of language's origins and forges a new understanding of the role of language in our evolution.

If we were to summon the first man and woman from their prehistoric graves, what would they—indeed, what could they—say to us?

Publishers Weekly

Drawing broadly from fields as diverse as anthropology, neuroscience and linguistics, Lieberman (Uniquely Human) attempts "to show that our ability to talk is one of the keys to understanding the evolutionary process that made us human" and that the anatomical changes that permitted our ancestors to speak could have occurred only if they were coupled with similarly dramatic alterations in the structure of our brains. Lieberman, an eminent professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University, asserts that early humans and Neanderthals interacted rarely, largely because the latter "were inherently unable to produce human speechthey would have sounded like village idiotsproducing nasalized, indistinct speech." He also presents ample evidence to refute the view, promulgated by Noam Chomsky and many others, that children have an innate sense of grammar. The book has flaws, however: principally, Lieberman too often demands too much prior knowledge on the part of his readers, leaving them to figure out for themselves how he jumped between points and among fields. In addition, his explanations can be as dry as the skulls he casts and studies. Consequently, only some readers looking for a technically savvy, hard-science companion to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct will be pleased with what they find here. (Jan.)

Philip Lieberman is University Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. He has written many books on the brain, evolution, and speech, and his photos are exhibited around the world.