How Ancient People Conveyed Information

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How Ancient People Conveyed Information
How Ancient People Conveyed Information

Video: How Ancient People Conveyed Information

Video: How Ancient People Conveyed Information
Video: Threads That Speak: How The Inca Used Strings to Communicate | National Geographic 2024, March
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Any living creature communicates with other representatives of its species through various signals: birdsong, dog barking, tiger roar - vivid examples of how animals communicate with each other. But man, as the crown of nature's creation, has perfected primitive methods of transmitting information at the earliest stage of his development.

How ancient people conveyed information
How ancient people conveyed information

Instructions

Step 1

The first people communicated with their fellows in the same way as modern monkeys communicate - using a set of inarticulate sounds. This language was very sparse and was limited to various variations of the combination of vowels with the addition of several consonants, and the tone of the ancient "conversation" was set by the facial expressions and intonation of the speaker. At the first stage of the formation of mankind as a species, this was quite enough: there was no need to transfer too much information to distant neighbors, future generations, and to each other.

Step 2

After thousands of years, a person has a need to convey messages that would have much more meaning than a signal on a hunt, about an attack, about a fire, etc. The speech of ancient people began to develop, and the first ancient languages appeared. Over long distances, information was transmitted through human messengers exclusively in oral form.

Step 3

At the same time, it became necessary to leave the memory of descendants about events in a separate tribe or natural phenomena that worried the first people. There was no writing at that time, and especially gifted individuals came up with such a way of transmitting information as drawings (petroglyphs). The most famous examples of rock art are the beautiful works of ancient people in the caves of Australia. Scientists called the amazingly beautiful and stylish images captured on walls and stones the "Mimi" style.

Step 4

The further development of society forced a person to invent new ways of communication. The advent of writing immediately gave humanity a tremendous impetus, it was a real achievement of human thought and one of the very first steps on the path to progress. Writing went through several stages of development, at first information was transmitted in the form of objects that could carry direct or figurative meaning, such writing is classified by modern historians and archaeologists as subject.

Step 5

Then came pictographic and hieroglyphic writing. The pictographic writing had the form of symbolic drawings painted on stones, tablets, and tree bark. This method was very imperfect, since could not convey information in a more accurate form. One of the most amazing types of writing is knot writing, it was a text written on a rope with the help of knots tied on it. Very few such examples have come down to modern man, the most famous are the knotted writing of the Incas and the knotted writing of the Chinese.

Step 6

Hieroglyphic writing soon replaced the pictographic one, and existed in some states until the last few centuries. Hieroglyphs were in the form of symbols carrying a specific meaning. The most famous are Chinese, Japanese and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The most recent human invention is alphabetic writing. It differed from hieroglyphic in that the recorded signs did not denote a specific word or phrase, but a separate sound or a combination of sounds.

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