The Origin of Language

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: the need to share childcare.

Through cutting-edge science, infused with sharp humour and insights into the history of biology and its luminaries, Beekman reveals the happy ‘accidents’ hidden in our molecular biology – our chromosomes, DNA and proteins – that led to one of the most fateful events in the history of life on Earth: humans giving birth to ‘underbaked’, highly dependent babies. To care for them, early human communities had to cooperate and coordinate, and it was this unprecedented need for communication that triggered the creation of human language – and changed everything.

Both enlightening and entertaining, The Origin of Language is a landmark publication by a brilliant biologist on how a culture of collaboration and care has shaped our existence from the very beginning.

About the Author

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 forThe 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.