For ninety per cent of our history, humans have lived as ‘hunters and gatherers’, and for most of this time as talking individuals. No direct evidence for the origin and evolution of language exists; we do not even know if early humans had language, either spoken or signed. Taking an anthropological perspective, Alan Barnard acknowledges this diffi culty and argues that we can nevertheless infer a great deal about our linguistic past from what is around us in the present. Hunter-gatherers still inhabit much of the world, and in suffi cient number to enable us to study the ways in which they speak, the many languages they use and what they use them for. Far from ‘primitive’, they are linguistically very sophisticated, possessing extraordinarily large vocabularies and highly evolved languages of great grammatical complexity. Barnard investigates the lives of hunter-gatherers by understanding them in their own terms. How do they, as non-literate people, perceive language? What do they use it for? Do they have no knowledge of grammar, or have they got so much grammatical sense that they delight in playing games with it? Exploring these and other fascinating questions, the book will be welcomed by all those interested in the evolution of language. Alan Barnard is Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa in the University of Edinburgh, where he has taught since 1978. He has undertaken ethnographic research with hunter-gatherers in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. He participated in the British Academy Centenary Research Project ‘From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain’. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy, and he serves as an Honorary Consul of the Republic of Namibia. His numerous publications include Social Anthropology and Human Origins (2011) and Genesis of Symbolic Thought (2012), and this volume completes his series on human origins.