Communicating, 3rd Edition

11Then, now, and on

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391975-15

Let me finish by laying out my own conclusions. This means confronting some hard questions.

Like:

Are humans as communicators sharply distinct from animals? Was there a sudden leap into full humanity with the acquisition of language? Did speech really come before writing?

Communicating humans – again

First, to start with this, we humans are indeed distinctive in our palette of communicative skills and resources: predominantly audiovisual but with some use of other senses.

We are distinctive in two other ways too. First that, though many animals use external marks to communicate through time, humans have developed this into organised systems to a degree and in a way that, so far as we know, ...