"What blocks the way to a better understanding of language evolution, it is widely held, is above all a paucity of factual evidence. Not so, argues Unravelling the Evolution of Language. This book finds the main obstacle, instead, in a poverty of a specific kind of theory - restrictive theory. It shows, too, that this poverty of restrictive theory is one of the root causes of the paucity of factual evidence." "This book is for scholars working on problems of language evolution in a variety of fields, including the various subfields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, (evolutionary) psychology, archaeology, cognitive science, palaeontology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience (neurology), anatomy, physiology, genetics, primatology, ethology, computer/mathematical modelling."--BOOK JACKET.