There are over 6000 languages spoken on Earth, and collectively they amount to the single most important factor in the evolution of humankind. But at one point there, it’s very likely that there was one universal language – one which branched out around the same time human migration started, somewhere between 60,000 and 150,000 years ago. The theory that this created the multiple languages that we know today is the foundation for this extraordinary new book by Steven Mithen, The Language Puzzle.

Mithen’s exploration takes us on a fascinating journey across the entire timeline of human evolution – using genetic science, linguistics and archaeology, the latter in which Mithen has an extensive background – to offer exciting and well-rounded theories about how it all came about. Did the human voice start off as a series of animal like noises; what would that sound like and how did that evolve into communicable words?

In The Language Puzzle, Steven Mithen offers both fact and theory in a quest to uncover the backstory on one of human’s oldest traits and is an extremely well-researched book which both engages and excites just as much as any piece of crime fiction one might lay hands on.