This book proposes a step-by-step process by which the early evolution of human language originated. Starting from an ape-like communication system, pre-human ancestors were “pumped” out of the rainforest by cyclic climate changes between 10 and 6 Mya 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 then finally to words. Bancel details each of these steps in which the origin of language and the origin of humans were concordant.

Pierre Bancel was attracted to languages and focused on learning a dozen including German, Russian, Hindi and Kabyle as well as Classical Latin and Greek. He has earned a MA in Language Sciences from the Université Auguste et Louis Lumière, Lyon, with an emphasis on comparative linguistics, instrumental phonetics and fieldwork on Bantu languages. He has worked as a copyeditor for the French dictionary, 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 dozens of linguistic research articles in scientific journals, many of them in the then Harvard-based Mother Tongue, of which he has become a coeditor since 2021. This is his first book, summarizing years of research and into language and how articulated words may have come about to an originally speechless ape species, turning them into humans in the process.