Do you know how it came about, how human communication was born? Who were the first beings to communicate? I'll tell you that in this video!
Hello dear person! Welcome to the Aqui Tem Comunicação channel. I'm Eliane Terrataca, graduated in Social Communication, and I was very happy when I received Ana Cláudia's question about how communication started, after all, what is the history of communication?
I love history! That's why I decided to record this video here. And as I did a research with a lot of attention and affection to bring you this information, I hope you leave your like here on the video, subscribe to the channel and activate notifications to receive more content about the wonderful universe of communication.
You can imagine, from the little you already know about communication, if you've watched other of my videos here on the channel, that studying the history of communication is almost the same thing as studying the history of humanity, the history of being human. To understand how human communication came about, we basically have to understand the history of human beings. How men emerged, developed and got here where we are today.
And it all started in prehistory. That's right, back in the time of hominids and proto-humans. At that time there was no language and no language, there were no words for people to communicate.
So those beings, our ancestors, began to use what they had at their disposal, there they used their own bodies, they discovered sounds that they could also use and objects that were available there. But it was a very, very animal thing. It was difficult for them to understand each other and it is also difficult to get information about it.
Because, as they didn't record what they were doing, it's hard to understand how everything happened in that period. But then the brain developed and what we know as the Age of Symbols and Signs emerged, which is that period when they started making drawings, discovering materials. .
. Those really cool cave drawings, that was one of the first forms of human communication . And there is evidence that it was Homo Erectus, despite being very specific cases in history that identified beings who made this type of record, but it was the Homo Erectus species that presented the first version of a complex thought, capable of making a drawing.
That to draw you need to have a higher imagination and creativity. We need to be able to put ourselves in a really imaginary place to be able to represent that in the form of a drawing. And there's a drawing that I'm going to put here on the canvas, which was made 400,000 years ago.
It may seem silly to you. It's a risk, literally a risk, there's this representation here of Homo Erectus holding the shell with the engraving. This is not a photo, but it is very well represented with the traits that we have already identified in Homo erectus.
And that shell was found. It exists and is preserved. And there are those little scratches there.
You can look at it and say: but what a risk, a child does that. Yes, but no other being, a dog, for example, cannot scratch a paper, nor a cat, unless you teach it. Not here.
Here he saw a little shell, picked up a pebble and said: oh, I'm going to scribble something here. And from there he began to develop creative thinking. Cool huh?
After that, thousands and thousands of years later, another species appeared, called Cro Magnon, who went with him, who have records that it was there that speech and language was born. And why did he develop this ability? As always, communication fits a human need.
In that case, in the past, as everyone knows, the human being was always going out into the world. There was no home, nobody built a house. I would go into a cave to escape the rain and then leave.
It was a real animal, without residence, it was free and went where there was food. And it was Cro Magnon who started to make an attempt at residency, even if it wasn't definitive. But some of them started.
They went out to hunt and fish, whatever, and went back to the cave. They began to maintain themselves in these environments. Despite continuing to switch, he left one cave and went to another, but they settled there for a period.
It is not known if they stayed a week, a few days, months, years. But they started staying, settling in one place and precisely because of that, the need for you to be together with other people, maybe three of them or more. But it is not possible to know if they had several or if it was just a small family.
But precisely because they were there together in one place, the need arose to create a kind of community, of society. And for that to happen, they had to organize a division of labor, a kind of primitive cooperativism, which is nothing more than getting together to hunt bigger animals. They lived at the same time as the mammoths.
You know that giant hairy elephant that went extinct? They shared the space of the planet with the mammoths, which were very fat, full, had a lot of meat. They wanted to hunt that animal, which had food there for many weeks or more.
But alone he can't catch an animal of that size, no matter how wonderful the tool and weapon he had there at the moment. So, they started to get together and create hunting groups. And how do you combine?
Let's go get that mammoth! How do you warn that there is a hunting opportunity there? Communicating!
At least, to this day, no one can transmit thoughts, so it was necessary to create a kind of communication language there so that they could understand each other in order to organize themselves to feed themselves and maintain the security of the space they were in. Just out of curiosity, I will highlight here an excerpt from the book História e Vida, by Antônio Alfredo, which talks exactly about this time of Cro Magnon and the birth of communication. It is possible that, at first, imprecise gestures were accompanied by a babbling of sounds.
As the appropriate gesture to express the thought was found, the babbling becomes a sound symbol. Finally, gesticulations and noises are replaced by systematic signs and words. That is, it started with a strange noise there that they made.
They probably started repeating specific sounds at specific times. For example, a sound of danger, a sound of “look what I see”, a sound of “let's go”. .
. I'm throwing my theory in the air here. It must have been more or less like this.
Then one did it, the other did the same and it ended up being agreed that in that group that sound had that meaning. This is a language and a way of communication. It still didn't have a complex grammar, a structure like the one we know today, but that's how it started.
And you know what's more curious? That there began to be a crisis in the Cro Magnon community when the climate changes on the planet appeared, that the mammoths migrated to other places, they began to go to places further away from where they were established And even the conditions of the world's climate began to get bad for them and they didn't feel good. They started to have health problems, they started to get hungry, there was a lack of food and as soon as it started to happen, they started to have conflict.
Then came other ways to communicate, but to fight with each other. Look how crazy! The human being has conflict since we didn't even know how to speak yet.
You don't even need to know how to speak to create conflict with someone. But in these primitive communities it was a little more difficult, because they didn't have this rational side very well developed. They were even more animals.
So you think these conflicts were resolved on the basis of dialogue? Certainly not! There was a lot of fighting even at that time, to decide who would be in charge, who would have the most food, who had the best cave.
(Any resemblance to today is purely coincidental). Then the human being evolved and, as we already know, began to really develop a language system to be able to communicate better. This Cro Magnon species became extinct because of these climatic conditions and lack of food and change of the planet itself.
How you can study If you are curious to know this ancestor of the human being. And finally, with the Homo Sapiens that we are, the Age of Writing came about. And that's when the biggest revolution in human communication took place.
First there was cuneiform writing, and hey, it only appeared five thousand years ago. Do you believe that? It's too little time.
If you think about the history of the world, the human being is very short of time. And it is precisely this development of a writing system that left prehistory behind. And this written language emerged to record property, make calculations, and record debts.
There was more of a mathematical and financial intent behind it. It is cuneiform writing that is considered to be one of the oldest. She had very complex signs.
There were more than 2,000 signs, characters, I don't know what to call it. So almost no one knew how to use it! It was really for very few.
Very few even had the patience, time and willingness to learn how to use it. But over time, it became simpler and, with that, it allowed it to become a little more popular, but it took a long time for human beings to really learn to write, to be something popular. (until today there is society that cannot and is not able to have this type of education, unfortunately).
But it started to get a little bit more popular and other people started using it more creatively to record ideas for work, to leave messages and all that. After that, many other languages started to appear around the world almost in a synchronized way. Some were inspired by other languages, but the human being was developing, creating new languages, new forms of writing.
And another very important milestone in the evolution of communication was the possibility of printing information. That's when the books appeared and the press also appeared. The history of the press is also very much intertwined with the history of human communication, which was one of the revolutions.
Journalism, the press, was born when it was possible to print and record information on paper, which was our dear Gutenberg who invented the press that revolutionized the media and allowed the crazy evolution of communication channels until we got to where we are today. And today it is impossible to list all the possibilities of communication. Now we are moving towards a reality that is very involved with artificial intelligence, with virtual communication, with online communication.
And one thing that I want to leave out of curiosity for you, which is a personal reflection of mine, that we are migrating a lot to platforms that disconnect us from this personal contact, from the eye to the purely human eye. There is a lot more of an intermediary in the channel among us, with specific codes to make our communications happen because we are connected for a long time. We relate much more on the internet today than I do personally.
I'm sure you talk to very few people in person. You may be an exception, but most people talk face-to-face with very few people. Everyone is more connected and talking on WhatsApp, making video calls, and everything else.
Not that this is bad, but it is a transformation that is happening in human communication, which is part of our history and that perhaps many other crazy things, innovations can arise to change everything again the way we communicate. Anyway, this is out of curiosity for you who would like to know how human communication emerged in the world, to understand a little about the history of communication. I hope this video was helpful to you in some way.
Or else amusing, curious. If you have any questions, have any suggestions, leave your opinion, if you want to complement what I said or correct something I may have said wrong, feel free to leave it in the comments space, I'll pay attention and I'm happy to receive messages, and I answer everything, okay? Take the opportunity to leave your like here on the video, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications, if communication is a subject that interests you.
Thank you so much for watching this far. A kiss and until the next video!
