The Language Puzzle

The relationship between language, thought and culture is of concern to anyone with an interest in what it means to be human.

The Language Puzzle will explain how the invention of words around 100,000 years ago replaced musical communication and introduced metaphorical thinking. This new dynamic in the process of culture change has taken us from the stone age to the digital in a mere blip of evolutionary time, with profound implications for how we think about and relate to our ancestors.

Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship, Steve Mithen unpicks the deep limitations of music as a means of communication, how language as we understand it today revolutionised the mind, society, and culture, and what exactly it all has to do with Beethoven's ninth symphony.

This radical new work of prehistoric philosophy challenges existing theories about language and makes a powerful case for far greater diversity in early humans than has ever been previously appreciated.