This volume provides the most up-to-date and holistic but compact account of the peopling of the world from the perspective of language, genes and material culture. The book provides detailed answers to the question of where we all came from.

The prehistory of the Eastern Himalaya has forever been shrouded in legend. In this pioneering volume, a group of world-leading linguists and anthropologists reconstruct its extraordinary prehistory from an interdisciplinary perspective for the first time.

The Arizona Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group that migrated around 1700 to First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation and who, while speaking Hopi, have also retained their native language. Paul V. Kroskrity examines this curiosity of language and culture, explaining the various ways in which the Tewa use their linguistic resources to successfully adapt to the Hopi and their environment while retaining their native language and the cultural identity it embodies.

The East Baltic languages are well known for their conservative phonology as compared to other Indo-European languages, which has led to a stereotype that the Balts developed in isolation without much contact with other speech communities. This book challenges that view, taking a deep dive into the East Baltic lexicon and peeling away the layers of prehistoric borrowings in the process. As well as significant contact events with known languages, the lexicon also reveals evidence of contact with unattested languages from which previous populations must have shifted.

This volume explores the ways in which historical linguistics and language change interact with ideology. The chapters present twelve in-depth case studies that cover topics ranging from the location of the Indo-European homeland to language policy in the former Yugoslavia.

Taking an anthropological perspective, Alan Barnard explores the evolution of language by investigating the lives and languages of modern hunter-gatherers.

'When, why, and how did language evolve?' 'Why do only humans have language?' This book looks at these and other questions about the origins and evolution of language. It does so via a rich diversity of perspectives, including social, cultural, archaeological, palaeoanthropological, musicological, anatomical, neurobiological, primatological, and linguistic. Among the subjects it considers are: how far sociality is a prerequisite for language; the evolutionary links between language and music; the relation between natural selection and niche construction; the origins of the lexicon; the role of social play in language development; the use of signs by great apes; the evolution of syntax; the evolutionary biology of language; the insights offered by Chomsky's biolinguistic approach to mind and language; the emergence of recursive language; the selectional advantages of the human vocal tract; and why women speak better than men. The authors, drawn from all over the world, are prominent linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, social anthropologists, and specialists in artificial intelligence. As well as explaining what is understood about the evolution of language, they look squarely at the formidable obstacles to knowing more - the absence of direct evidence, for example; the problems of using indirect evidence; the lack of a common conception of language; confusion about the operation of natural selection and other processes of change; the scope for misunderstanding in a multi-disciplinary field, and many more. Despite these difficulties, the authors in their stylish and readable contributions to this book are able to show just how much has been achieved in this most fruitful and fascinating area of research in the social, natural, and cognitive sciences.

In this book Colin Renfrew directs remarkable new light on the links between archaeology and language, looking specifically at the puzzling similarities that are apparent across the Indo-European family of ancient languages, from Anatolia and Ancient Persia, across Europe and the Indian subcontinent, to regions as remote as Sinkiang in China. Professor Renfrew initiates an original synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the new archaeology of cultural process, boldly proclaiming that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation--issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and, as a result, largely neglected since. Challenging many familiar beliefs, he comes to a new and persuasive conclusion: that primitive forms of the Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier than has previously been assumed.

Decolonizing "Prehistory"critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern historical-archaeological scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume empowers Indigenous voices and offers a nuanced understanding of the American deep past.

Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy — the systematic study of such layers — may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.