Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Rewards and challenges of multi-perspectival work on the evolution of language and speech / Rudolf Botha -- Why only humans have language / Robin Dunbar -- Is sociality a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of language? / Luc Steels -- Holistic communication and the co-evolution of language and music : resurrecting an old idea / Steven Mithen -- Music as a communicative medium / Ian Cross and Ghofur Eliot Woodruff -- Cultural niche construction : evolution's cradle of language / John Odling-Smee and Kevin N. Laland -- Playing with meaning : normative function and structure in play / Sonia Ragir and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh -- The ontogeny and phylogeny of non-verbal deixis / David A. Leavens, Timothy P. Racine, and William D. Hopkins -- The directed scratch : evidence for a referential gesture in chimpanzees? / Simone Pika and John C. Mitani -- The origins of the lexicon : how a word-store evolved / Maggie Tallerman -- Language : symbolization and beyond / Eric Reuland -- Grammaticalization from a biolinguistic perspective / Elly van Gelderen -- Recursion, phonological storage capacity, and the evolution of modern speech / Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn -- Why women speak better than men (and its significance for evolution) / Bart de Boer -- Mosaic neurobiology and anatomical plausibility / Wendy K. Wilkins.

Prominent linguists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, anthropologists, and natural scientists examine issues and advances in understanding language evolution, ranging from the co-evolution of language and music to the evolutionary biology of language.