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Like many people, I am interested in our history and future as a human species. Our potential for positive development gives me hope beyond my own finite lifetime.
We humans generally attribute our success (if we can call it that) to features like our upright walking, our large brains, our ability to make tools, and (for some people) a special creation by an intelligent designer. For me, however, our most important attribute is our ability to communicate with one another, and thereby to coordinate our activities, in ways that no other known species has been able to do.
In this article I will summarize the key advances in our human ability to communicate, and I will describe how they have affected our development as a species.
In the beginning was the word and demonstration — show and tell.
Several attributes of our bodies enabled our first, most significant advance in communication over earlier species. We have a vocal apparatus that enables us to make a complex variety of rapidly changing sounds. We have hands that enable us to grasp, carry and manipulate objects and to gesture in complex ways. We have stereoscopic vision that we can voluntarily direct to focus our gaze on specific things in our visual environment. We have stereoscopic hearing that we can use to locate sounds in our aural…
