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the prehistory of language. Modern types of language can only have appeared long after Homo erectus disappeared. Yet some sort of communication must have been used in big-game hunting, and all primates make meaningful signals. How early hominids communicated may never be known, but one plausible suggestion is that they began by breaking up calls akin to those of other animals into particular sounds capable of rearrangement. This would give the possibility of different messages and may be the remote tap-root of grammar. What is certain is that a great acceleration of evolution would follow the appearance of groups able to pool experience, to practise and refine skills, to elaborate ideas through language. Once more, we cannot separate one process from others: better vision, an increased physical capacity to deal with the world as a set of discrete objects and the multiplication of artifacts by using tools were all going on simultaneously over the hundreds of thousands of yearsin which language was evolving. Together they contributed to a growing extension of mental capacity until one day conceptualization became possible and abstract thought appeared.
    It remains true, though, that if nothing very general can be confidently said about the behaviour of hominids before man, still less can anything very precise be confirmed. We move in a fog, dimly apprehending for a moment creatures now more, now less, manlike and familiar. Their minds, we can be sure, are almost inconceivably unlike our own as instruments for the registration of the outside world. Yet when we look at the range of the attributes of Homo erectus it is his human, not pre-human, characteristics which are most striking. Physically, he has a brain of an order of magnitude comparable to our own. He makes tools (and does so within more than one technical tradition), builds shelters, takes over natural refuges by exploiting fire, and sallies out of them to hunt and gather his food. He does this in groups with a discipline which can sustain complicated operations; he therefore has some ability to exchange ideas by speech. The basic biological units of his hunting groups probably prefigure the nuclear human family, being founded on the institutions of the home base and a sexual differentiation of activity. There may even be some complexity of social organization in so far as fire-bearers and gatherers or old creatures whose memories made them the databanks of their ‘societies’ could be supported by the labour of others. There has to be some social organization to permit the sharing of cooperatively obtained food, too. There is nothing to be usefully added to an account such as this by pretending to say where exactly can be found a prehistorical point or dividing line at which such things had come to be, but subsequent human history is unimaginable without them. When a sub-species of Homo erectus , perhaps possessing slightly larger and more complex brains than others, evolved into Homo sapiens it did so with an enormous achievement and heritage already secure in its grasp. Whether we choose to call it human or not hardly matters.

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Homo Sapiens
    The appearance of Homo sapiens is momentous: here, at last, is recognizable humanity, however raw in form. Yet this evolutionary step is another abstraction. It is the end of the prologue and the beginning of the main drama, but we cannot usefully ask precisely when this happens. It is a process, not a point in time, and it is not a process occurring everywhere at the same rate. All we have to date it are a few physical relics of early humans of types recognizably modern or closely related to the modern. Some of them may well overlap by thousands of years the continuing life of earlier hominids. Some may represent false starts and dead ends, for human evolution must have continued to be highly selective. Though much faster than in earlier times, this evolution is still very slow: we are dealing with something that took place