SPEECH! How Language Made Us Human

What makes us human? Why are we the only animals who wear clothes, drive cars, trawl the internet, and fly helicopters on Mars? It’s all because we’ve learnt to talk: yet remarkably, we still don’t know how we did it. SPEECH! suggests an answer that’s been hiding in plain sight – the simple yet radical shift that turned our analog grunts and shrieks into words. But its consequences are far from simple: being able to share ideas through language was an evolutionary tipping point – it allowed us to link up our minds. SPEECH! traces our roller-coaster ride with language from hunter-gatherer to urban hipster: the epic tale of the struggle for knowledge against the false gods of culture, religion and identity – as we teeter toward a destination we may still resist, but ultimately cannot escape.