Primitive Communication Quotes

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.

When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.

[Rock 'n' roll] music started out with some cat banging a log with a couple of pieces of stick. He sent a message across a river and although the cat on the other side receiving the message didn't know the exact words, he did understand basically something about what was being communicated.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

I guess storytelling's always been in my blood. My mom said I was always dressing up and jumping in front of the camera and putting on plays. There must be a part of me that has to express that. If we were living in prehistoric clans, I'd probably be sitting by the campfire taking two stones and showing you how dinosaurs were chasing us. I'd be the one finding a way to communicate and perform.

Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the only way I knew to communicate was screaming and throwing it on the floor.

Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.

Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words.

Stories are the most primitive and purest form of communication.

Gossip, in its earlier forms, contained information that was critical to survival because, in clans of 150, what happened to anyone had a direct impact on everyone.

Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.

and we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

Lately I've been believing that music predates speech.

When chimps threaten, they open their mouth and show their teeth. It's a little like waving a knife in front of you. It's very primitive, and therefore bizarre.

Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It's like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody's going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You're communicating. You're trying to learn and teach at the same time. You're your own student and you're your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.

The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.

The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

For a long time humans probably were in touch on a deeper level with the depths of their being, unconsciously so, the same way an animal or a tree is. Gradually, though, more and more of their identity went into the movement of thought. They identified more and more with the movement of thinking.

The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.

Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth, humanity's revelation in word and sound was not differentiated in song and speech, but they were one.