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The Life and Death of Pre-Historic Oral Cultures
© 2004 Neils Clark

Cultures separated from communication die. One culture’s language can be destroyed by another’s more systemically powerful language. Languages can also, quite simply, die out. In the light of recent communication theory, pre-historic cave paintings and artifacts will show that oral traditions existed 30,000 years ago, and have potentially persisted and perished in times as distant as one million years ago. That we have precious little information surrounding the history of these cultures is inextricably tied to language. If communication is the key to preserving the past, it may have implications for safekeeping our present. “Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.” (Durant, 1935).

Signs and codes, so identified by Fiske, are the glue of communication(1), their interplay finding themselves the basis of oral and literate culture. Consequently, culture is the grout whereby both oral and literate communication forms find themselves glued incontrovertibly to history. But that will come into play a bit later. Signs are acts or artifacts that relate to something other than themselves. Codes are the variegated systems by which a culture would make sense of signs. For example, a man smiles at a woman on a crowded city street. If this occurs in Japan, then the man may be seen as a pervert. In the United States, the man may simply be seen as friendly. In this instance the sign is the smile, whereas there are two codes being used to analyze the sign: one occurring inside Japan, the other inside the United States. Theorists also assert that these first creations of signs and codes were necessarily oral(2), not written. “Oral expression can exist and mostly existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality.” (Ong) Beyond turgid regurgitation, this differentiating between signs and codes, and between oral and literate societies will provide necessary logic in examining pre-historic cultures.

Ong classifies grapholects as dialects that become dominant due to a commitment to writing. As one dialect of a language grows in use, it so restructures thought in a way that further fosters its prominence. All other dialects, many of which may or may not have been wiser choices as a common language, die. The same theory can be applied to the death of entire languages. During war, colonization and the like, a culture entering conflict with superior communication systems will likely destroy the conquered civilization’s original way of communicating. The death of the language may not destroy the culture outright. Many traditions, technologies, and social systems will persist under the signs and codes of the ruling culture. Geertz suggests that without its original language a conquered culture, as it was known to its people, is destroyed forever. One example is the Spanish domination of the Aztecs.

Differing social systems, as identified by Tehranian(3), allowed the Spanish to eventually destroy the Aztec language. Five systems of particular significance are communication technologies, cultural paradigms, communication elites, communication institutions, and representation mode. First, the Aztec adoption of writing was by no means pervasive. Pictographic characters with rebus-style phonetics(4) were used, an amazing feat for so secluded a society. Nonetheless, Europe had a firm grasp on writing and had just begun using an early version of the printing press. Second, the Aztec seemed to amalgamate supernatural worldviews with overtly religious views. As for the Spanish, they found themselves nestled comfortably into Absolutism, a system by which monarchs were seen as ruling from divine right. Third, the communication elites of the Aztec were primarily the hereditary nobility, priests, and similarly, a monarch. The Spanish system differs only in the particulars. They subscribed to the Catholic religion whereby priests had considerable say, but the monarch held the ultimate word. This is reflected in, fourth, their communication infrastructure or institutions. Destroyed by Hernan Cortés in 1521, intellectuals can only speculate as to the layout of, among others, the Templo Mayor precinct in Tenochtitlan, Mexico(5). The Christians of Spain built a great many churches that remain to this day. Fifth, the representation mode of the Aztec was slowly moving between a mythological and a religious system, while that of the Spanish had firm grounding in Christianity. These forms of advanced systems contributed immensely to the eventual cultural atrophy and near-death of the indigenous cultures of South and Central America.

“Nahuatl speakers explain that they are ashamed to speak Nahuatl outside of their community, and that they believe it is important that they speak Spanish to their children… in order to provide them with the language of power that will afford them the greatest opportunities for success in the mainstream culture.” (Rolstad, p3)

While Nahuatl is still spoken naturally in small bucolic communities within Mexico, the bulk of its speakers are bilingual and do not intend to teach it to their children(6). When the Spanish first arrived, they used Roman script to record a large body of the Aztec literature. Catholic priests burnt thousands of Aztec manuscripts. The Aztec culture and language “on its own terms” may prevail in small villages. Even in English we use the words “tequila”, “chili”, and of course “chocolate”. These important words have their roots in Nahuatl, which makes it extremely difficult to suppose the language as completely dead, despite our Romanization and book burning. And yet if Spanish had not been imposed on the Aztec, then it seems very obvious that their way of remembering their traditions and past would have changed history, if only for them.

The Aztec-Spanish conflict illustrates cultural death via attack, yet the logic of written thought may show us that cultures can just as easily die without the help of another. All they need to do is stop communicating. Without a means of communicating we are unable to transmit our culture, the means by which all of our youth learn to survive. Culture and communication are intertwined on so base a level that any contingency that completely destroys oral communication clearly destroys that oral culture. If Ong’s theory regarding memory is to be believed, then destroying a culture’s prodigious body of literature may alone be enough to destroy that culture. With our mind in a literate state, too far removed from our orality, our now prodigal memory would leave little of our ancestors to our children.

While it less suits our communicative purposes to cover a broad array of scientific and prehistoric fact, a small glazing is necessary. From the earliest known fossils, the so-called Peking man estimated to have lived over a million years ago, and was found with, among other things, the remnants of fire and tools. Three (known) ice ages later, around 125,000-100,000 B.C., we find an increasing quality in flaked flints. Then around 75,000 B.C., tools such as hammers, anvils, scrapers, planes, arrow-heads, spearheads, and knives appear. One ice age and 47,000 years later, carbon isotope analysis of the charcoal has show that pictures of horses at Chauvet, France, to be between 29,700 and 32,400 years old(7). Paintings unearthed at Lascaux have been dated at about 17,000 years old. Yet how can the dating of cave paintings help us to date the existence of oral cultures?

And so we return dutifully to signs and codes. A painting is a sign, interpreted through a code. Our paradigm, or preconception of pre-historic man is of the hunched and grunting “cave man”. Our contemporary code for interpreting a 30,000 year old painting is therefore skewed as one that denotes a man drawing horses, boars, and any creature he considers a rare delicacy, placating magic that might allow him to taste them after his next hunt. That the Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal man drew these pictures, however, makes it clear that this may not be the case. A painting is necessarily a sign. For a written or drawn sign to appear, it is absolutely necessary by Ong’s analysis that there be an oral language predicating it. Whoever painted these horses 30,000 years ago almost certainly had a word to denote them. If these people had created a word for horse, it stands to reason that they possessed a fully developed oral language. Using communication, especially the interplay between signs and codes inherent in pre-historic cave paintings, we can assess when and where oral traditions were in use throughout our pre-history.

While it is logical to assess oral language as predating written counterparts, including cave paintings, it is important to realize that it is not necessarily the case. In all possibility early man stumbled just as blindly as we are led to believe. His etchings may have very well been the muddling of a mind denied meat far too long. While this may have been the case, painting of this magnitude requires not only a dying liquid, a container in which to store it, and some type of brush, but it requires a conception of art. Man did not likely gather these elements as a mute. It seems fair to believe that anywhere we find cave art, we can assume that man was, in a developed manner, speaking.

If signs can be identified as coded artifacts, then it is possible that oral traditions have been in use for between 100,000 to one million years. If, as Durant suggests, man was indeed chipping flints, and creating a variety of tools, it seems reasonable that he would have names for these artifacts. This is an easy point to refute, because unlike the communicative form of a cave painting, an artifact is not so easily linked to orality and language. A sign, nonetheless, is any artifact coded by a particular culture. If a body of people happens to be using bone anvils, chipped flints, or hammers, then it stands to reason that these artifacts carry some designation. Within our current paradigm of pre-historic man, however, it is very easy to dismiss the use of tools as central to our development of language. This paradigm may suggest that these apes silently picked up and began chipping a rock. Then, silently learning the crafting of tools, our ancestors were empowered in the development of oral traditions. The opposite is just as likely true. Logically, in order to be able to learn even to chip and use a flint, a somewhat complex spoken language would be necessary.

And what of Peking man? In 1934, only 13 years after the excavation of Zhoukoudian had begun, Durant estimated the cave’s age at roughly one million years. In 1982 excavation had finished, and now human remains are dated from between 600,000 and 300,000 years old(8). As with 100,000 years ago this early man leaves behind no as yet discovered cave painting. Yet in the Zhoukoudian caves, no less than 100,000 quartz, flint, and sandstone tools have been found, 17,000 of which have been examined. Inside, fire was found to be used at four locations(9). These innovations do not necessarily implicate oral language. Their presence, however, was not likely enacted through vocal grunts and gestures. If the advanced artifact of fire was present, it was very likely possessed of a recognizably coded sign, not to mention the coded signs for its very creation. Whether a million years ago, or 300,000, it remains sensible to believe that Peking man required a fair oral tradition before making use of fire, or fashioning tools.

If pre-historic oral cultures have indeed persisted they have since perished, making the moral seems obvious. They have either killed each other’s variegated languages, as the Spanish did to the Aztec’s Nahuatl, or have lost their main line of communication. Using the theories of Fiske and Ong, we may be able to accurately date spoken language. If indeed oral culture existed as far back as 30,000 BC., it is fascinating to wonder how their language, and then culture, died out. Social systems theories also offer a unique perspective. If we advance high enough in communication forms, will our language and therefore culture become impervious to attack? Can literacy alone protect our culture from dying out in the eyes of those who will come far in the future? One thing remains clear: If we wish to pass our culture to our children, we must preserve our ability to communicate.

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