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Jasper Fforde is our guest blogger during the week of July 23th. If you have any questions for Jasper Fforde, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Thursday Next: First Among Sequels:

Literary sleuth Thursday Next is out to save literature in the fifth installment of Jasper Fforde’s wildly popular series

Beloved for his prodigious imagination, his satirical gifts, his literate humor, and sheer silliness, Jasper Fforde has delighted book lovers since Thursday Next first appeared in The Eyre Affair, a genre send-up hailed as an instant classic. Since the no-nonsense literary detective from Swindon made her debut, literature has never been quite the same. Neither have nursery rhymes, for that matter. With two successful books of the Nursery Crime series under his belt, Fforde takes up once again the brilliant adventures of his signature creation in the highly anticipated fifth installment of the Thursday Next series. And it’s better than ever.

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The Origins of Language Earliest Origins Until the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment (a European intellectual movement), most thinking about the origin of language had assumed it began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The most recent theory of the origin of language is that simple hand gestures were used as long ago as six or seven million years, shortly after the first humans diverged from the apes. Shouting would have been used as alarm calls or emotional outbursts. About five million years ago, an early hominid, started to walk upright, and a more complex form of gesturing was probably used. Then, two million years ago the brain size increased and hand gestures were used in various combinations as the primary means of communication. As recently as 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens may have changed the main means of communication from hand and facial gestures to vocal-isations and the use of differing sounds to convey meanings. Gradually the use of gesturing diminished, although we still use it today to emphasise speech, even during telephone conversations, when the person at the other end cannot see the gestures.