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Welcome to the You Are Not So

326

So

So

326 Welcome to the You're not so smart podcast.

My name is David McCraney, and in this episode we sit down with Madeline

Beekman, a professor, emerita, of evolutionary biology and behavioral

ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia.

And Dr. Beekman is our guest because she wrote a book titled The Origin of Language,

in which she presents a completely new and fascinating hypothesis slash models

slash theory for how language complex spoken communication using words and sentences and metaphors

and similes and so on emerged in homo sapiens in human beings in you and me and the rest of us.

This is something I've been obsessed with for a while, and thanks to that obsession,

I ran across Beekman's work and asked if she could explain it on this program.

She said, yes, and that's what you are about to hear.

But before we get into that, I just want to briefly mention, I think it's worth explaining

or at least sort of just covering in general, that this is still a great and fundamental mystery,

this question.

How did language begin? How did spoken language emerge in human

beings? As an actual scientific investigation, we've been trying to get to the answer to that

question for more than 150 years or so.

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