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The Singing Neanderthals

Steven Mithen

A fascinating and incisive examination of our language instinct from award-winning science writer Steven Mithen.

Along with the concepts of consciousness and intelligence, our capacity for language sits right at the core of what makes us human. But while the evolutionary origins of language have provoked speculation and impassioned debate, music has been neglected if not ignored. Like language it is a universal feature of human culture, one that is a permanent fixture in our daily lives.

In THE SINGING NEANDERTHALS, Steven Mithen redresses the balance, drawing on a huge range of sources, from neurological case studies through child psychology and the communication systems of non-human primates to the latest paleoarchaeological evidence.

The result is a fascinating and provocative work and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless and unimportant evolutionary byproduct.

  • Classification : Science & The Environment
  • Pub Date : JAN 1, 2007
  • Imprint : Orion
  • Page Extent : 384
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9780753820513
  • Price : INR 899
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Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. He previously studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Universities of Sheffield, York and Cambridge, before joining the University of Reading. An award-winning archaeologist, Steven Mithen specialises in prehistoric hunter-gatherers and the earliest Neolithic farmers, with long-term field projects in southern Jordan and western Scotland. He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, New York Review of BooksNew Scientist and the Guardian and has authored over 200 academic articles and books, including The Singing Neanderthals and After the Ice. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.

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