![]() Which is to say: for the overwhelming bulk of human history on this lovely earth, our world, spiritual aswell as physical, was inseparable from wild nature it was, we were, wild nature. And what better vehicle for condensing, organizing, and making memorable and transferable the spoken word than. And since we also had no writing, all accumulated knowl edge-social and religious values, tribal and family histories, myth, law, legend, ritual, everything-had to be precisely memorized and orally transmitted from generation to generation. ![]() neanderthalensis.) At that time and until the most recent moment of human history, our hunter-gatherer ancestors had no cultivated crops, no domesti cated livestock, no industry beyond small-scale production of crude implements. sap the competi tive edge over contemporary H.s. (In fact, the ability to communicate intricate thoughts may have been what gave early H.s. Full language, it is thought, evolved forty to one hundred thousand years ago, in parallel with the triumphant emer gence of Homo sapiens sapiens. To wit: The best scientific guess is that crude, “proto” language first appeared among the progenitors of our species more than two million years ago. The answer is easy: I haveno choice it’sin my genes. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ĭ A V I D P E T E R S E N San Juan Mountains, Colorado Knee-Deep in itsAbsence I am occasionally asked why I have chosen to make my career (such as it is) writing about nature.
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