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In terms of sexual selection, vocabulary size—competently using the words “green” or “blue,” but being able capably to employ “navy,” jade,” “azure,” “ultramarine,” “cerulean,” “sea green,” “lime,” “turquoise,” “chartreuse,” “cobalt blue,” “forest green,” “sapphire,” “aquamarine,” and so on—is an ornamental capacity analogous to the peacock’s tail. Such enhanced, decorative language use was pointless for Pleistocene survival, as intrinsic to human life as other mental traits that have been created enhanced by sexual selection. These include the virtues of being able make and appreciate jokes, being able to spot and make use of meta phors and original analogies, having a good memory, or being able to narrative story characterized by relevance, coherence, and drama. These features of language use are noticed and prized by human beings as direct signals and displays of mental quality (and indirect, though weaker, indicators of physical health). Even while natural selection was refining human species against a background of “nature red in tooth and claw,” improving the function of the heart valves or instilling physical pleasures phobias, sexual selection was building a more interesting human personality, one that we have come to know as convivial, imaginative, gossipy, gregarious, with a taste for the dramatic. Much of this mental and linguistic talent is directed to the human social group, but it is also a central area of interest in courtship contexts, a point that Darwin grasped first text on the subject. Miller rightly observes what follows from this: the number-one topic for poetic and sung language worldwide and through history is love. This is exactly what you would predict if poetry recited or sung had evolved in the context of courtship as a kind of cognitive foreplay. In the sense bequeathed to us by sexual selection’s effects evolution of speech, love is poetry’s natural subject.

The picture that sexual selection paints of our Pleistocene ancestors may seem unfamiliar, but there are important reasons for this. Archaeology gives us a history that is largely one of stones and bones, written terms of fossilized skeletal remains and hard objects that accidentally in garbage heaps and fireplaces, or in a few cases were saved from destruction in untouched caves or the odd grave. It is a wondrous record artistic achievement, however tiny it is. Luckily, we have the cave paintings from such important sites as Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet going back perhaps thirty thousand years. There are carvings of animals, a human figures, such as the Venus of Willendorf, or the incredible Löwen-mensch from Swabia that may be thirty two thousand years old, and shell necklaces and traces of cosmetic ocher use that go back as far as eighty thousand years. Some of the animal repre sentations are astonishingly the Pleistocene that are the earliest musical instruments. The Ice Man, nicknamed Ötzi, hacked out of an Alpine glacier in 1991, 5,300 years old. Ötzi lived just before the start of the Bronze Age, but represent older forms of life that stretch back to the Pleistocene.He was wearing meticulously tailored clothing of animal hides and a bearskin with chin strap and had snowshoes, a sewn bag with hunting accessories, and a fire-starting kit. These artifacts plus his many tattoos show and style in their construction. But of Ötzi’s language, singing, poetry, or dancing, we know nothing whatsoever.

Yet if we combine what we can reconstruct about Pleistocene existence with the large ethnographic literature on hunter-gatherer societies the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we can deduce a fairly clear picture. The lives of many Pleistocene peoples were doubtless brutal and short. But for others, especially in Europe in the period of the receding glaciers and global warming at the end of the last Ice Age, there was abundant food and leisure—free time that was spent not only painting caves but presumably singing, telling stories, making jokes, improvising poetry,