Contents -- Preface and acknowledgements -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of abbreviations -- Notes on the contributors -- 1. Introduction: rewards and challenges of multi-perspectival work on the evolution of language and speech -- 2. Why only humans have language -- 3. Is sociality a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of language? -- 4. Holistic communication and the co-evolution of language and music: resurrecting an old idea -- 5. Music as a communicative medium -- 6. Cultural niche construction: evolution's cradle of language -- 7. Playing with meaning: normative function and structure in play -- 8. The ontogeny and phylogeny of non-verbal deixis -- 9. The directed scratch: evidence for a referential gesture in chimpanzees? -- 10. The origins of the lexicon: how a word-store evolved -- 11. Language: symbolization and beyond -- 12. Grammaticalization from a biolinguistic perspective -- 13. Recursion, phonological storage capacity, and the evolution of modern speech -- 14. Why women speak better than men (and its significance for evolution) -- 15. Mosaic neurobiology and anatomical plausibility -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z -- Contents: The Cradle of Language.