Neanderthal Language

Rudolf Botha is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and a former Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Utrecht University. Previous works include Language Evolution: The Windows Approach (Cambridge, 2016).

• Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Pursuing an intriguing but murky matter; 2. Telltale Neanderthal teeth; Part II. Symbolic behaviours: 3. Making and wearing personal ornaments; 4. Producing cave art; 5. Beautifying bodies; 6. Burying the dead; 7. Leaping to language; Part III. Non-symbolic behaviours: 8. Making stone tools; 9. Teaching stone-tool making; 10. Hunting big game; Part IV. Implications: 11. Dispersing the murk; Notes; References; Index.

'Searching for the origin of human language has over the last decades developed into a lively field of scholarly discourse, generating a range of new hypotheses. But are these hypotheses really empirically sound? There is no one to answer this question more competently than Botha, as he demonstrates once again in this thrilling book on Neanderthal language.' Bernd Heine, University of Cologne