How the tongue began. The story of the greatest invention

"How the language began" offers the reader an original, detailed history of the language as a human invention - from the emergence of our species to the appearance of more than 7,000 modern languages. The author disputes the popular theory of Noam Khomsky about the innate language instinct among representatives of our species. According to Everett, historically, speech developed gradually in the process of communication. The book talks about the language from the perspective of an interdisciplinary approach, on the one hand, paying great attention to the mutual influence of language and culture, and on the other hand, the characteristics of the brain that allowed a person to speak. Although fossils and linguists brought us closer to understanding how the language appeared, the discoveries of Everett turned over the modern linguistic world, thundering far beyond the boundaries of academic circles. Conducting field research in the Amazon tropical forests, he stumbled upon the ancient language of the tribe of hunting hunters. Suffering the traditional theories of the origin of the language, Everett came to the conclusion that the language was not a feature of our species. In order to understand this, a wide interdisciplinary approach is needed, taking into account both the cultural context and the features of our biology. This book tells that we know what we hope to find out and what we never know about how people came from the simplest communication to the language