Table of Contents

Preface ix
1 An Intractable Challenge? 1
2 Toward Protolanguage 31
3 Let’s Sign (and Speak) Erectine 65
4 Composite Signs 95
5 Grammatical Structure 117
6 The Firelight Niche: From Sign to Speech 155
7 From Protolanguage to Language 181
8 Without Miracles? 213
Glossary 223
Notes 229
References 239
Index 265

About the Author

Ronald Planer carried out postdoctoral research at the Australian National University from 2015 to 2020 in the School of Philosophy and is currently a Research Affiliate of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Evolution of Language in the School of Languages and Linguistics at Melbourne University. Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is the coauthor of Language and Reality- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language and the author of The Evolved Apprentice- How Evolution Made Humans Unique (both published by the MIT Press) and other books.

Reviews

"[A] clear step forward....provides a plausible, empirically grounded account of language evolution in a captivating format, striking a difficult balance between brevity, clarity, and richness of documentation and detail....This is not a technical, specialist monograph, rather an accessible synthesis that offers enough ‘big picture’ to satisfy most generalist cognitive science readers, and enough details to keep connoisseurs turning (and annotating) the pages."
—Language and Cognition