Chapter 6 on everything that is known about the last common ancestor to chimps and humans really brought all the evidence together to get a sense of the issues and the researchers so that this all important starting point for language evo could be approached.
This book kept surprising me by being more than I expected. It is not another book on the evolution of language. The author states a clear purpose to avoid offering a particular theory but to instead show how the field is a very broad endeavor that needs to respect what many researchers are doing and that needs to value a wealth of testable hypotheses. That made sense but sounded vaguely tedious. But then I kept getting hooked on each chapter. Each one is a gem that could be a small book on its own that quickly, clearly, and thoroughly covers some element of the puzzle. Chapter 2 on evolution could seem like unnecessary backtracking, but the coverage makes evolutionary theory in all its latest theoretical twists seem alive again while showing how these issues about general evolution relate to language evo. Chapter 6 on everything that is known about the last common ancestor to chimps and humans really brought all the evidence together to get a sense of the issues and the researchers so that this all important starting point for language evo could be approached. It was so well done that I was shocked to realize that the whole chapter was only 15 pages. The whole book is like that even at 500 pages. It feels succinct and absorbing throughout. The wide coverage and the, no doubt, years in the making all contribute to this sense that it might be "encyclopedic" as one of the back cover reviews has it, but it is all very well crafted from the to-the-point style to the page layouts.