The first words humans ever spoke to one another were probably not very interesting.

They were probably about nearby food, or about an incoming predator, something immediate

that was both easily observable to all parties and currently relevant.

And this isn't just speculation on my part. Most animal communication is exactly like this.

Animals that communicate verbally generally have alarm calls, mating calls, you know, the deal, basic stuff, the here and now.

And I'm not denigrating this. It's still complicated. There are monkeys who have different words for different predators, vervet monkeys. They have a word for leopard, a word for snake, and a word for eagle. If they scream eagle, then everybody's going to duck, and if they scream snake, everyone's going to jump. And even with this basic stuff, like alarm calls, things can get pretty complicated, pretty fast. I actually just read a study recently about how male swallows will sometimes do a fake alarm call if they see that the female they like is with another male, forcing everyone to flee and interrupting the flirtation.

In human terms, this would be like if your crush went to dinner with another guy and you showed up to the restaurant and pulled the fire alarm.

Is it a bit of a blunt instrument? Yes. But is it being deployed in a pretty complicated way? Absolutely. I think so.

And that's just with the good old-fashioned present tense here and now communication.

But you can nevertheless imagine what a big leap it is between here and now communication and there and then communication.

Think about how much more inherently complicated, there was a predator over there, is is compared to there is a predator right here.

You have to be able to have a concept of time and you have to realize that things still exist when they aren't visible.

An idea human babies take ages to understand.

You have to understand the abstract idea of events

outside of your temporal and spatial lens. The idea of displacement, of communicating about

things that are neither current nor proximate, is insanely complicated, even when you don't add false alarm type layers to it.

It's so complicated that, according to the linguist Derek Bickerton, there are only four

groups of animals ever proven to do it in the wild.

First, there are the humans. Then there are bees and ants,

and we will undoubtedly talk more about them in the future, because that's really interesting.

But today, we're going to talk about the fourth and perhaps the most surprising member of this

elite group of communicators.

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