Talking- The Origins of Collective Consciousness

One of the topics of human history where there is still no general agreement, is actually quite an important one.
Unless we know the answer, we cannot REALLY assess our history.

We have a pretty good idea of when Man started to eat meat.
When he learnt to make fire.
When he learnt to sculpt.

But interestingly, not when he started to communicate.
How old is language?

Some think it is very old indeed.
Some think Homo Erectus, and certainly Neanderthal man could talk.

Others think it is much younger, a solely Homo Sapiens phenomenon, maybe no older than the Aurignacian.

So it could be older than 300,000 years.
Or younger than 40,000.
Does it matter?
Of course.

Because that is when our history begins.
That is when our collective consciousness begins.

We need to KNOW what humanity remembers.
Because with the coming of speech, comes the ability of man to remember beyond his own lifetime.

We don't remember the First World War ourselves.
But no human being will ever forget it.
At a deeper level, though we do not know it, is collective unconsciousness.
The things our parents communicate to us, without really explaining why, but because of something they remember, something they lived through, but we never will.

So what does humanity remember?

Looking back at the legends of humanity, what memories are contained within?



Certainly, the end of the last Ice Age.
The melting of ice sheets, the submergence of large areas by increased sea levels, the huge changes in climate, resonate somewhere in the myths of most peoples. Passed on surely, around the campfires of the first true villages, by the first agriculturalists, millenia before these garbled memories were written down?

Was the mastodon remembered?
Was the sabre-tooth tiger remembered?

Did early American peoples recount tales of the strange beasts they once competed against before they extincted?
And did these tales change over the millenia beyond recognition?




How much of Homo Sapiens early encounters with Neanderthals survives in the beliefs of most early peoples in Elves, Dwarves, or other beings like us, but yet not us?

How many primitive Gods carry the name of a mortal man who stunned his contemporaries so much, that his people could never forget him?
Maybe the man who first showed his tribe how to make a bow?

When did a caveman first tell a cavewoman, that the Moon belonged to them?

When did a caveman first listen to another caveman, slowly nodding, as he comprehended something, without needing to be shown?

We need to know these things. Because everything that happened before speech, was simply the past.
When Man started to speak, then History truly began.