Bickerton Derek. Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans

Hill and Wang, 2010. — 304 p.How language evolved has been called “the hardest problem in science.” In Adam’s Tongue, Derek Bickerton—long a leading authority in this field—shows how and why previous attempts to solve that problem have fallen short. Adam's Tongue is an extraordinary book. It tackles one of the most fascinating questions in human evolution, challenging many widely-held assumptions along the way. Its author's enthusiasm is contagious, and his irreverent humor makes it one of the funniest science books ever. And it is also a detective story, in which an eighty-year-old linguist attempts to solve the mystery of how we became human.
Unless you are an expert in the field, prepare to be surprised by many of his ideas. Bickerton is an original thinker, and he makes a number of counterintuitive but well-supported arguments that will make you reconsider things you used to take for granted. But his most controversial claim is the book's thesis: selective pressures which caused our ancestors to invent language had to come from their external environment.
That view is radically different from other theories of language origins, which focus on intra-species pressures. It is also at odds with every popular account of human evolution, in that it implies that our pre-linguistic ancestors discovered an ecological niche that was more special than their big brains. Moreover, that niche had to be so unique that no other animal ever stumbled into it. It may sound absurd, but so does the idea of animals inventing language, yet we are a living proof that it happened. Drastic phenomena call for drastic explanations. (AmReview, M.Khonin)