The Language Puzzle.

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: Saussure steered linguistics away from questions about the beginnings of language: for him it was a red herring, since words take meaning only in relation to one another, within the boundaries of their histories. The study of words can’t illuminate what came before words: there is no thread to be found in language which would help us trace human speech back to the moment of its emergence. ‘No society … knows or has ever known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such,’ Saussure says in Cours de linguistique générale (1916). ‘That is…