It all starts by looking a baby right in the eyes

Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."

The authors can't be faulted for lack of ambition. Along with their theory to explain the evolution of human language, they also have a thesis based on this theory for explaining autism - and a method of treatment. They provide a short course in primatology as they present their case for certain kinds of intelligence in chimpanzees, bonobos, and other apes.

For any readers who missed Soc/Anthro 101, they also provide an introduction to the salient points of the work of Franz Boas, Max Weber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emil Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. Throughout, the authors summarize the theories of those they take issue with, and explain why they do so, in a respectful way that inspires confidence in their fairness.

They provide an overview of the history of science, and the history of history itself, starting with Herodotus and Thucydides. After taking issue with Descartes early on for his mechanistic view of the human mind and the development of language, they pay him homage as the man who brought the ideas of the 17th-century scientific revolution to bear on the human mind itself. He was a great thinker on the subject of thinking who "established reason as a revolutionary force," they note.

This book is not so much a stroll in the park as an invigorating hike in the woods. But the trail is well marked, with many appealing stopping points along the way. The general reader who invests time and energy in "The First Idea" will be amply rewarded.

• Ruth Walker is the Monitor's chief copy editor.

1. Lower primates develop attention through shared gaze and back-and-forth vocalizations during play and feeding.

2. Our primate ancestors begin relating through subtle back-and-forth emotional interactions between caregivers and infants.

3. Australopithecines master two-way purposeful emotional interaction such as telling a story with gestures (5.3 - 1.4 millions years ago).

4. Early humans engage in shared problem solving, such as coordinating a hunt through body movements and facial expressions (2 - 0.4 million years ago).

5. Archaic humans acquire symbolic and linguistic abilities through complex interactions involving presymbolic communication (600,000 - 100,000 years ago).

6. Anatomically modern humans begin connecting ideas together and thinking logically (130,000 years ago - present).

7. Modern humans begin to think about thinking.

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