Page 45 - Encyclopedia Of World History

communication—overview 395

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did
it wrong. • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

Meanwhile, anthropologists studying ancient bones derived from the language of the Roman empire. Arabic
found that the first Homo sapiens, unlike earlier is spoken from Iraq to Morocco, lands conquered by the
hominids, had vocal cords capable of articulating words Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries. Most Latin
and minds able to carve sculptures and draw pictures: tan- Americans speak Spanish, most North Americans speak
talizing clues to the complex thinking such as language English, and many Africans learned the languages of their
requires. From the evidence of the bones, they deduced former colonial masters.
that Homo sapiens originated in Africa some 100,000 Though colonial empires have vanished, the spread of
years ago and then migrated to other continents. imperial languages continues. In fact, thanks to radio, tel-
At the same time, geneticists were identifying the evision, business, and the press, it has accelerated. In
resemblances between the DNA of people on different Africa, schools teach children French or English or Por-
continents. By doing so, they could determine the tuguese. To prosper in a globalizing world, increasing
approximate length of time since two groups separated numbers of people know they must speak not only their
and where their ancestors came from. What they found mother tongue but also a national or global language,
is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa well over and sometimes several.
100,000 years ago; some migrated to the Middle East The spread of national and global languages threatens
around 100,000 years ago; they reached Southeast Asia linguistic minorities. Languages spoken by small numbers
about 80,000 years ago; New Guinea and Australia of people, such as indigenous tribes in the Americas,
50,000 years ago; Europe some 40,000 years ago; and India, or Southeast Asia, are disappearing as young peo-
the Americas 15,000 years ago (all figures give or take a ple turn increasingly to the languages of television, the
few thousand years). press, the schools, and government, and see no reason to
The findings of these three sciences, arrived at quite retain the language of the older generation. By the end of
independently, are amazingly similar.What they tell us is the twenty-first century, only half the languages spoken
that the language ability is unique to Homo sapiens; that today will still be used.When languages vanish, so does
the first language was probably spoken in Africa over much of the oral culture that they carry, such as tales,
100,000 years ago; that humans dispersed throughout myths, and religious beliefs. Linguists are trying to record
the world; and that as groups split up, their languages and transcribe as many of the endangered languages as
changed in different ways, producing the incredible vari- they can before they disappear forever, but it is an uphill
ety that exists in the world today. Yet beneath that vari- battle. Often the only people still fluent in an endangered
ety, the ability to learn and use language is the same all language are old and cannot recall all they once knew.As
over the world, and all languages are equally capable of communication improves, the diversity of cultures in the
expressing the same range of ideas. world shrinks.
What caused the great variety of languages is separa-
tion. For millennia, as human groups dispersed, the dif- Visual Communication
ferences between their languages increased. Before Even before writing was invented, speech was only one of
10,000 years ago, when all people were gatherers and several means that humans used to communicate. People
hunters who lived in small bands that rarely interacted, of the foraging era painted on the walls of caves or carved
they must have spoken hundreds of thousands of differ- pictures on rocks. Such rock art is found in many places,
ent languages. Since the advent of agriculture and civiliza- the earliest in Namibia dating back 28,000 years,followed
tion, the trend has been reversed. Kingdoms and empires by the 16,000-year-old cave paintings of southern France,
relied on communication and imposed a common lan- and many others, from the Sahara to Hawaii. Some ar-
guage, if not on everyone, then at least on the educated. chaeologists even speculate that Australian rock art may
Several western European peoples speak languages date back as far as 75,000 years ago. Neolithic people