Reading about man’s need and desire to communicate and the long rich history of visual communication is a real gift. If we were still out hunting and gathering, we wouldn’t have time for this studying thing.
Trying to understand what it must have been like to feel the deep need to communicate takes me back to my oldest son’s early childhood. Aaron is ‘moderately-severely’ deaf. I remember how hard he would work to try to get his point across before he and I learned to sign when he as 18 months old. As the vast majority of people can’t sign Aaron has become a master of non verbal communication. You do not want to try and beat him in charades.
Aaron works in a grocery store and has to communicate with hearing people all day long and although it’s easy for him to communicate easy concepts (pictographs) and ideas (ideographs), trying to communicate deep feelings has caused Aaron real pain and profound frustration. It is a very painful thing for a parent to witness.
When I think of man first finding himself with that need to communicate, I think it must have been like that. I imagine that frustration would have been an important driving force behind our resolve to learn to communicate.
From the vantage point of our evolutionary place, it is incomprehensible to think of our lives without language. It wouldn’t be possible. If there were no language, no communication, we wouldn’t be able to peaceably coexist. Most of the problems we have in our world today are caused by a lack of communication at a deep level and about some of the very same things that drove us to communicate in the first place such as spirituality, economics, ownership and ideals.
To me, one of the most surprising things about even the earliest forms of visual communication is the methodical and artistic nature given to even the earliest forms. It shows how man’s intelligence really evolved in the face of requirement and opportunity.
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