In From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language Michael Corballis provides an engaging, highly readable and provocative account of the evolution of human language. The primary thesis of his book is that language evolved from manual and facial gestures rather than from animal vocalizations, as is often assumed. While this point of view has been expressed by others during the last few centuries (for example, Condillac in 1747), it has never been argued more forcefully and with as much supporting scholarly evidence. (I suspect that it has also never been argued with greater use of hand/mouth adages, clichés and puns.) Among the more provocative ideas is the suggestion that human speech, like writing, was a cultural invention subsequent to gestural language rather than the evolutionary essence of language.