How Language Began | Dan Everett | TEDxSanFrancisco
In December of 2022, British contemporary artist Es Devlin installed a public sculpture in concert with the Endangered Language Alliance, “Your Voices,” outside of New York’s Lincoln Center. The work responds to anthropologist Wade Davis’s observation: “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem ... See more
Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report
In the past, when trying to explain how our ancestors developed, we have often focused on a source of energy or a physical technology that aided their progress – for example, the invention of the wheel, the discovery of coal or the arrival of the plough. But what about the social technologies that helped organise us in pursuit of common goals by en
... See moreDavid McWilliams • Money: A Story of Humanity
The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
Kevin Kelly • What Technology Wants
Language, we can say with some confidence, was the greatest “technological” breakthrough of the Upper Pleistocene. It gave rise to a vastly more complex social life, a societal memory of cultural advances conveyed by word of mouth across generations, and a growing division of labor within society.