This is the third volume in a series of three. When I began writing the series, I never imagined that more than one volume would be required. In fact, though, each volume seems naturally to have succeeded the next. They were all written as complete in themselves, and each can be read quite independently of the others.

The first volume is called Social anthropology and human origins (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The idea was to look at issues in human origins with the eyes of a social anthropologist. The book brings together ideas from primate studies, archaeology, linguistics and human genetics. The focus is on both raw data and notions on which social anthropology has important things to say: technology, subsistence, exchange, family and kinship, for example.

The second volume is Genesis of symbolic thought (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Whereas Social anthropology and human origins covers material on primates, australopithecines and Homo alike, Genesis of symbolic thought is specifically concerned with Homo sapiens. It traces the earliest examples of symbolism, especially from recently discovered archaeological sites, and it reflects on them through debates within social anthropology, from Durkheim and Frazer to much more recent thinkers. The phrase ‘genesis of symbolic thought’ comes from Lévi-Strauss, who in 1945 stated that we can never know how and why symbolic thought came into being. My argument is that with developments since then in archaeological dating methods, in the science of genetics and with advances in linguistics, volcanology, climatology, neuroscience and many other fields, it should now be possible to look at the topic afresh, which is what I did in the book. My view is that full modernity began in southern or eastern Africa, possibly 130,000 years ago, possibly earlier, and certainly by 60,000 or 70,000 years ago.

The present volume, Language in prehistory, has a narrower focus, albeit still a ‘big’ one. It is specifically about the origins and evolution of language. Language in prehistory is essentially a book-length expansion of ‘The flowering of language’, a chapter within Genesis of symbolic thought. I look at this problem through the eyes of a social anthropologist, because that is what I am. This is what differentiates the present book from the literally hundreds of thousands that I have located through web searches on things like ‘origin of language’, ‘origins of language’, ‘language origins’ and so on.