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).

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


• 2: Robin Dunbar: Why Only Humans Have Language


• 3: Luc Steels: Is Sociality a Crucial Prerequisite for the Emergence of Language?


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


• 5: Ian Cross and Ghofur Eliot Woodruff: Music as a Communicative Medium


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


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


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


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


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


• 11: Eric Reuland: Language-symbolization and Beyond


• 12: Elly van Gelderen: Grammaticalization From a Biolinguistic Perspective


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


• 14: Bart de Boer: Why Women Speak Better Than Men and its Significance for Evolution


• 15: Wendy K. WIlkins: Mosaic Neurobiology and Anatomical Plausibility


• References


• Index

Prominent linguists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, anthropologists, and natural scientists examine issues and advances in understanding language evolution, ranging from the co-evolution of language and music to the evolutionary biology of language. An important and stylish contribution to a fascinating area of research.