Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Rewards and Challenges of Multi-perspectival Work on the Evolution of Language and Speech, Rudolf Botha

2. Why Only Humans Have Language, Robin Dunbar

3. Is Sociality a Crucial Prerequisite for the Emergence of Language?, Luc Steels

4. Holistic Communication and the Co-evolution of Language and Music: Resurrecting an Old Idea, Steven Mithen

5. Music as a Communicative Medium, Ian Cross and Ghofur Eliot Woodruff

6. Cultural Niche construction: Evolution 's Cradle of Language, John Odling-Smee and Kevin N. Laland

7. Playing With Meaning: Normative Function and Structure in Play, Sonia Ragir and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

8. The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Non-verbal Deixis, David A. Leavens, Timothy P. Racine, and William D. Hopkins

9. The Directed Scratch: Evidence for a Referential Gesture in Chimpanzees?, Simone Pika and John C. Mitani

10. The Origins of the Lexicon: How a Word-store Evolved, Maggie Tallerman

11. Language-symbolization and Beyond, Eric Reuland

12. Grammaticalization From a Biolinguistic Perspective, Elly van Gelderen

13. Recursion, Phonological Storage Capacity, and the Evolution of Modern Speech, Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn

14. Why Women Speak Better Than Men and its Significance for Evolution, Bart de Boer

15. Mosaic Neurobiology and Anatomical Plausibility, Wendy K. WIlkins

References

Index

About the Author

Rudolf Botha is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Stellenbosch, and a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. His books include Form and Meaning in Word Formation: A Study of Afrikaans Reduplication (CUP 1988) and Unravelling the Evolution of Language (Elsevier 2003).
Chris Knight is Professor of Anthropology at the University of East London. His publicatons include Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale UP 1995).