Communication History

The Origins of Speech and Language

Many animal species communicate, but the origins of speech and language are key elements in what defines modern humans. The unprecedented use of the tongue, lips, and vocal organs as instruments of communication separated humans from animals, who can vocalize but do not use their tongues to modulate sounds and routinely combine visual with audible properties and effects. Scholars associate the evolutionary emergence of human speech with the vital need for cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies.

Humans employ an open system with an infinite number of meanings being produced by combining a limited number of symbols. Linguists also emphasize humans’ unique capacity for displacement—using words to represent things and happenings that are not presently or locally occurring. Although the evolution of speech is archaeologically invisible, current assumptions are that human speech was developed 500,000 years ago, symbols about 30,000 years ago, and writing approximately 5,000 years ago.

The Development of Writing

After humans began to speak, the second most important development was that of writing. Artifacts from 75,000 years ago, such as a piece of ochre engraved with diagonal cross-hatch patterns, are considered the earliest known examples of symbols. Cave paintings from the Chauvet Cave dating to the Upper Paleolithic (30,000 BCE) are considered the oldest known symbols created to communicate across time.

Petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface, dated to around 10,000 BCE, mark the next significant step. Other less permanent forms of communication—such as symbols carved in wood or earth, specially arranged symbols, tattoos, and quipus (talking knots)—probably developed during this time. Such forms have been observed in hunter-gather cultures still existing today. Communicating relatively simple messages over distances could have been accomplished using fires, smoke signals, beacons, drums, and horns.

Next in the progression came game pictograms (or pictographs), a form of proto-writing in which symbols represent concepts, objects, activities, places, or events by illustration. The first known form of written language was a form of pictograms, cuneiform. Ancient cultures around the world were using pictograms, such as tokens marked with simple pictures representing basic farm produce, since about 9,000 BCE.

Pictograms then evolved into ideograms, which are graphic symbols representing ideas. Whereas a pictogram represented something resembling their form (e.g., a circle could represent the sun), an ideogram could represent related concepts (e.g., heat, light, day). The Vinča script (5,421 catalogued signs) and the early Indus script (3,700 seals and 417 distinct signs in specific patterns) are examples of ideographical proto-writing systems, conveying a message without encoding language.

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