The Language Puzzle, as Francis Gooding recently noted in the LRB, isn't so much a puzzle solved as it is a puzzle reassembled—Steven Mithen's latest excavation into how we talked our way out of the Stone Age feels less like breakthrough scholarship and more like a well-worn path trodden by linguists, archaeologists, and armchair etymologists since Ferdinand de Saussure decided that the origins of language were, in his estimable opinion, a red herring best left to the realm of poetry and speculation. And yet here we are, still peering into the dark matter of human communication, trying to decipher whether language evolved to help us hunt mammoths or whether mammoths evolved to help us practice conjugating verbs in the past perfect continuous tense—a question that, frankly, keeps me up at night wondering if I've been pronouncing "mammoth" correctly all along.
This is where Just curious, what tools do you actually use to read/listen to content in your target language before you're fluent? becomes unexpectedly relevant, because Mithen's project mirrors the experience of anyone who's ever hit that immovable rock in the road of language acquisition—the moment when you realize that knowing vocabulary and grammar doesn't actually prepare you for the sheer, unadulterated mystery of how humans ever figured out how to turn breath into meaning. The book's real value lies not in its answers but in its ability to make you reconsider the questions you didn't know you were asking while simultaneously making you wonder if "apoplast" has anything to do with why we can't quite grasp the difference between perfect and progressive tenses—which is exactly what happened to me anyway.
What Gooding identifies as the book's primary weakness—its failure to deliver "new and exciting" insights—misses the point entirely. In a field where everyone's still arguing about whether the proto-indo-european people yode or merely contemplated yoding, sometimes the most radical act is simply gathering up the scattered shards of theory and laying them out in neat rows like archaeological pottery fragments that might, with sufficient dedication, eventually reconstruct the whole damned bowl. Mithen does something more subversive than discovery here; he performs an autopsy on certainty itself, showing us how the very tools we use to dissect language often end up dissecting us right back. The real puzzle isn't how language emerged from the stone age—it's how we convinced ourselves that any of this makes sense at all.
Which brings us to the fascinating possibility that Interstitium, Apoplast. might be the actual solution to the language puzzle, if we're willing to accept that maybe the space between our thoughts is where meaning truly lives, and that every time we open our mouths to speak, we're just helping the interstitium out with some much-needed ventilation.