15
15
T HAT NIGHT, YOUR MUM and dad tuck you into bed. You close your eyes. You wait for them to click the door shut. Then you wait for them to check on you five minutes later. Then you wait for them to go to bed themselves. Then you turn your light back on and prop yourself up.
Mike and Mark Visit a Group of Early Humans is, like every Mike and Mark book you have ever read, about two boys called Mike and Mark. One is blond and thin. The other is ginger and thin. Both have rosy cheeks and long arms. Despite the innumerable adventures they go on, Mike and Mark never seem to grow up.
In this particular book, Mike and Mark have travelled back in time to the era of early humans, who are developing an early language. These early humans are not babbling like children – they are not saying ‘dadada’, ‘bababa’, or ‘tatata’ – figuring out what noises they can make by simply making them. Instead, thanks to evolution, their oesophaguses and airways are separating, their tongues are becoming agile and strong, their vocal cords becoming capable of producing a variety of sounds.
In this Mike and Mark book, Mike and Mark actually only have minor roles. Mostly they stand there with their anachronistic clipboards – playing the role of anthropologists and making notes on the changes they are witnessing. To aid the pacing of the plot, time is sped up a gazillion-fold.
Mike and Mark hear the early humans making a variety of noises to one another. Over the course of years, they observe the early human community coming to a consensus about what sounds should denote what things. This keeps on happening. In the end, the early humans end up attaching sounds to everything in the whole wide world – not only concrete things such as spears and rocks, but also feelings such as anger, states such as death, and concepts such as hierarchy and the idea of language itself. As the sounds and shapes of their language get more complicated, so does the wiring that makes up the early humans’ minds. For better or worse, with the development of language, the early humans get smarter.
Language spreads like a contagion. While Mike and Mark are witnessing just one early human community, words are sprouting up everywhere around Planet Earth. There is variation. Some communities have subcommunities, each with its own dialect. Other communities are more isolated, speaking incomprehensible languages whose resemblance to other tongues is, at most, passing.
At some point, Mike and Mark try to communicate with the early humans.
‘You there!’ Mark cries to a female early human. ‘What are you doing with that stone? Are you writing down your language? Are you crafting yourself a tool?’
At this, the female early human smiles, but says nothing. She does not understand modern English. She is also not writing down her language. Written languages won’t come about for ages.
A little later, the same human says some incomprehensible words to her son.
‘This language sounds like Greek to me, Mark!’
‘You’re mistaken, Mike. Greek won’t come about for millennia. Neither will the country of Greece. The tectonic plates have yet to form that land mass! That’s how far in the past we have travelled!’
Our protagonists witness the rise and fall of oceans, the formation of volcanoes, and the erosion of whole mountain ranges. Meanwhile, thousands of languages grow, flourish, take flight on the back of sound waves, and then disappear. Most of these languages consist of sounds. Some of these languages consist of hand signs. All of them consist of gesture. All of them have rules. These rules need no real explanation; they are innate, implicit, even to small children. Indeed, children and adults know the rules without knowing that they know the rules. They acquire the ability to navigate these rules with dexterity.
After many, many thousands of years, some humans acquire the ability to write down their words.
These are no longer early humans. They are just humans. Mike and Mark get very excited when this happens. You know this because they say things like ‘Ah, so this is writing!’ and ‘Wow, it’s exciting they’ve developed their own writing system!’ and ‘That alphabet looks alien to me!’
That said, most of the humans don’t write down their languages. This isn’t because their languages are less interesting because, when it comes to language, there is no such thing as less interesting. Some societies simply get around to writing their words down, others don’t, and that’s it.
But the ones that are etched in stone – e.g. Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Chinese – are destined to be remembered. The ones that exist just in time and space – most of the ones Mike and Mark witness – are destined to be forgotten.
Mike and Mark return to the present day. They try to remember what the early humans sounded like, but their memories are not great and they soon give up.
Further reading:
Mike and Mark Visit a Group of Early Humans