We have no record of when human communication began. We don’t really even know when humanity began. Somewhere in the past a child was born, the first child who was more human than anything else, when compared to modern humans. But assuming that mankind survives another million years today there must be children who are more like our million-year descendants than they are like our million-year ancestors. It’s all very confusing.
And scientists disagree on when we began communicating, but it was probably before our ancestors were ape-like beings. Many animals from social insects to birds to meerkats have demonstrated the ability to communicate via sound and motion. Human speech may have begun as ape-like proto-speech. The sounds apes make do have meanings, even if they are only crude compared to human words. Birds may sing different songs, such as announcing their quest for a mate, defending their territory, or warning others that a predator is in the area.
Communication Has Been Critical to Human Experience
But one thing we are certain of is that humans only began writing down their languages within the last few thousand years. It is possible that, based on drawings found carved into stone at places like Gobekli Tepe, humans were using carved shapes and symbols to represent ideas for more than 10,000 years, but the meaningful recording of language is only about 6,000 years old based on current available data.
In the analysis of ancient writing systems experts look for meaningful contexts and repetitions. Jean-François Champollion is famous for his translation of the Egyptian language as recorded on the Rosetta Stone, but linguists don’t always have translation tables to work with. They often must figure out what ancient writing means based on the fewest of clues.
What I find remarkable is that we have remembered so much about pre-writing skills (such as how to hunt, how to practice dentistry, and how to prepare food) but we have quickly lost the secrets to ancient writing systems. Scientists have even discovered traces of ancient forms of trade going back 100,000 years. But writing is not so ancient and often defies our logic.
Modern Communication Has Changed Our Society
One need only look at the Internet to realize just how much things have changed. Where thousands of years ago many people might risk their lives to carry a clay tablet only a few hundred miles, today millions of people casually exchange pictures and chit chat across thousands of miles. Social media sites like Pinterest allow people like Nicholas Bredimus to upload pictures from random sources.
We also share our life stories and family histories as if we were chatting with neighbors. As you can see from Nicholas Bredimus’ listing on Ancestry.Com we can learn about people generations before us who had the same names. It is almost like two generations calling out to each other across the centuries.
The world runs on information and information spreads rapidly across the world. We rely on written information and digital information. The digitization is part of electronic communications. The Internet shares a common history with radio and television, and they all rely on communications satellites to boost their signals and send them around the world.
As you can see from this article about Nicholas Bredimus on Flight Global, the boundary between print communications and digital communications has blurred. Each new wave of communications technology preserves something of the past. We’re still using campfires to send out messages of warmth and comfort – but now we upload videos of those campfires to the Internet.
Conclusion
From all of this I think we can say that the more sophisticated a mode of communication is compared to previous modes the less likely it will survive in the long run. Maybe a million years from now humans will no longer need writing. Maybe they will have evolved some new way to communicate we cannot yet imagine. And then perhaps they will not even know that we did at one time record our thoughts and ideas in symbols etched on stone, clay, and paper.
