Steven Mithen (/maɪðən/), a British archaeologist seen in these parts a couple of years ago , published a book called The Language Puzzle: How we Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age that was recently reviewed in the LRB by Francis Gooding (Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026; archived ), and even though you won’t learn anything new and exciting, it’s a useful roundup of ideas on the topic. Some excerpts: The Language Puzzle is a grand tilt at that seemingly intractable problem. In it, Steven Mithen marshals the disparate factors and fields of research that might give us some clue as to how language evolved, and tries to build a plausible account of how we ended up as the only speaking animal. Of necessity, the book ranges very widely, because the fields that touch on the evolution of language are in no way unified. Mithen draws from palaeontology, archaeology, primatology, the study of animal communication, linguistics, neurobiology, philosophy of mind, evolutionary genetics and more.…