Linguistic Transmission

Thinking about the phrase 'applying skill' today, I forget the context, building or cooking probably. Reading a book on language that had a very good section on pidgins and creole tongues. One thing led to another and I was soon sitting on the sofa with a dozen reference books at hand. I love these diversions. There are (or were) 400 languages spoken in Nigeria. The Plains Indians had a codified sign language they used to talk with other tribes, because they all spoke a different language and none of them were written. Interesting that the hieroglyphic calendar hides, a record of particular events in a specific year, a sacred item that might record twenty years, could be almost universally understood. "Oh yeah, I remember that year, when the Cottonwood trees exploded." Best guess is that language developed between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, certainly when you get to the caves, Chauvet, the oldest, there's a vocabulary. The kid's hand print, and the footprints on the floor: "Honey, come and get the children, they're fucking up my work". When I look at this, study linguistic transmission over the last 50,000 years, one thing rises to the top, that we needed to communicate. Real language, not the grunts and gestures that indicated meaning, but actual communication. Based on nouns and verbs. Another interesting dig is an open-air site, at Mezirich, Ukraine, a place that must have been the killing-field of all time. There were five dwellings there, the frames built entirely from the mandibles of mammoth, interlocked, in a herring bone pattern. Covered with several layers of cured hides and heated with animal-fat lamps, this was the mansion of the time. 15,000 kilograms of bone to frame each house. Cool use of materials. Looking at renderings of a reconstruction, I had the thought that I could do that, with the old Cape Playhouse crew. The original yurt, or how to build if there isn't any wood and you haven't discovered rammed-earth or concrete. Imagine the scope of the killing field. The number of dead animals from centuries of hunting. Imagine what the smell must have been like, in those huts. It must have been a rich environment. Another Luna Moth. Maybe it means something but more likely it's a mere coincidence. Some years I don't see a Luna Moth at all, but this year there have been five of them. Five huts at Mezirich. Fifteen thousand years ago. Fairly recent, actually. They lived close to the edge of the retreating ice and there must have been a reason for that. Runoff, plants feeding animals, and these very dumb mammoths? I don't know. I question any reconstruction. I'd rather just muddle along.