Reddit reviews Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans

The First Word is a good overview of research that has been done on the evolution of language and why it's such a difficult and controversial topic.

I did my senior seminar/thesis on the evolution of language and in addition to The First Word we started with these articles for a general look at the questions we have regarding evolution of language and what the answers may be.

• Bickerton, Derek. Language evolution: A brief guide for linguists. Lingua 117, 2007.
  
  
• Knight, Studdart-Kennedy, and Hurford. Language: A Darwinian Adaptation? The Evolutionary Emergence of Language, 2000.
  
• Christiansen and Kirby. Language evolution: consensus and controversies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, 2003
  
• Pinker, Steven. The Big Bang. The Language Instinct, 1994
  
• Pinker and Bloom. Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 1990
  
• Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch. The Faculty of Language: What is it, who has it and how did it evolve? Science 298, 2002
  
• Jackendoff and Pinker. The nature of the language faculty and its implications for the evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky). Cognition 97, 2005
  
  Edit: P.S. I haven't read Bickerton's Adam's Tongue, but I've read several of his articles and found them useful, so that title may also be worth having a look at.

Well, it's not my phrase. That's what the study of the origins of language is referred to as in Linguistic literature. It's actually somewhat confusing, because "the evolution of language" refers to how language originated both as a social structure and as a biological feature of humans, while "language evolution" refers to the processes by which established languages change over time (ie, Old English becoming Middle English becoming Modern English).

Also, there are many researchers who would argue that language is a special case of meaning—that is, without language there is no meaning, and structure preceded semantics. Particularly, Deacon, Bickerton, and Torey all express this idea in different ways. I'm partial to this point of view myself.