The Origin of Language
How we learned to speak and why
$33.59
- Paperback
320 pages
- Release Date
28 July 2025
Summary
The Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney makes a radical, compelling new account of the birth of language that puts women at the centre of the story.
Conventional explanations for how humans became ‘the language animal’ (proposed by men such as Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari) focus on our need to cooperate to hunt, fight or make tools. In this revolutionary new account, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman locates a more convincing origin of language: t…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781761634369 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1761634364 |
| Author: | Madeleine Beekman |
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster Australia |
| Imprint: | Scribner Australia |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 320 |
| Release Date: | 28 July 2025 |
| Weight: | 390g |
| Dimensions: | 33mm x 234mm x 153mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
‘Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling. [An] exciting idea … a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language’ * The Guardian *
About The Author
Madeleine Beekman
Madeleine Beekman is professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia. In the academic year of 2020–21, Beekman was a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), which is where the idea for The Origin of Language was born. She currently lives with her husband in Australia’s northern tropical rainforest, where she can observe the endangered cassowary from her office. She has two adult daughters and a tiny granddaughter.
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