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This book proposes a step-by-step process through which the early evolution of human language originated. Starting from an ape-like communication system, prehuman ancestors were "pumped" out of the rainforest by cyclic climate changes between 10 to 6 million years ago and subjected to harsh predatory conditions and the absence of safe havens. A phonetic "modal voice" evolved in response. Inarticulate sounds gradually became articulated syllables. The diversification of these syllables eventually led to symbolic references and, finally, to words. Bancel details each of these steps in which the origin of language and the origin of humans are shown to be concordant.

Pierre Bancel was drawn early on to languages and focused on learning a dozen of them, including German, Russian, Hindi, and Kabyle, as well as Classical Latin and Greek. He has earned an MA in Language Sciences from the Universite Auguste et Louis Lumiere, Lyon, with an emphasis on comparative linguistics, instrumental phonetics, and fieldwork on Bantu languages. He has worked as a copyeditor for the French dictionary Le Robert, a journalist for various periodical publications, and as a translator by the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna. Bancel translated into French two books by Stanford linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, and has published several dozen research articles in linguistics journals, many of them in the then Harvard-based Mother Tongue, of which he has been coeditor since 2021. This is his first book, summarizing years of research into language and into how articulated words may have emerged in an originally speechless ape species, turning it into humans in the process.