Origins of Human Communication

Tomasello's argument, built on decades of comparative work with great apes and human infants, is that human communication did not begin with language but with pointing and pantomime -- cooperative gestures grounded in shared intentionality. Apes can request, but they cannot inform or share attitudes; humans do all three, and this capacity for shared intentionality is what made language possible, not the reverse. The book is the central treatise on pre-linguistic communication and its evolutionary origins, delivered with the precision of someone who has spent years designing experiments to test exactly these claims. It reframes the language question entirely: the puzzle is not grammar but cooperation.