Human beings love to communicate. It will be one of the great discoveries to find out which came first the voice or the brain.
Through stele, scrolls and printing presses to the internet, telephone and radio phone we will develop our ability to communicate easily with each other anywhere in the world and one day through the Solar System. We will chatter and gossip, gab and talk, discuss and lecture to our hearts’ contents. We are after all social animals if not always sociable animals and communicating is part of how we get along, how we manage to survive, how we live.
But it is surprising that we don’t think other animals do the same to any degree. We seem to think that because we can communicate so widely and because elephants don’t have cell phones somehow they don’t talk to each other, they don’t express themselves to each other, they don’t gossip.
And the reason we believe this is because we don’t actually understand them. All our communication depends upon understanding each other, translating to each other whatever we want to say into languages we can converse in. How bizarre that we don’t credit other species with the ability to communicate. We don’t think they have a grammar. We don’t think they have linguistic structure at all.
Yet we are all linked and nature makes us endeavour in similar ways to each other. To strive using similar biologies.
I would be very surprised if animals do not actually talk to each other in ways we could not even guess at.
Very interesting, Daniel and, of course animals communicate. Whales do it over many miles, dogs do it at rather closer (hind) quarters and cats do it from a higher plane! You’re right though; most people don’t give this any thought. We’re so busy being ‘superior’ that we don’t consider other species as being capable of communication. I had a chat with a stag beetle last night – well, I apologised to him for throwing him out of my house! But maybe I’m just slightly mad……..???
No madder than the rest of us.