Language, viewed from any perspective, remains almost an ineffable miracle: the tool that liberated our early ancestors from the realm of the apes, the tool that gave rise to history, the tool that enables us even to imagine such things. But where did language come from? In this, the first book to trace the exciting breakthroughs of this new field, Christine Kenneally shows how a few brilliant scholars took evolutionary linguistics from wild speculation into hard science and brought us face-to-face with the origins of that most human of characteristics. Book jacket.