I've wondered about that myself. What if verbal language sucks so much as an expressive tool because it's what we evolved to make up for having lost a faculty which made it unnecessary to express ourselves*? What if all our species' striving for better communications, everything from written language to radio to the invention of the Internet, were an attempt to regain that faculty which we've lacked for so long that we don't even realize we remember it? What if the occasional human ability to non-visually notice being stared at by another human, or similar things, is a vestige of that faculty -- sort of a mental wiggling of the ears? What if that's what the Garden of Eden and all the other fall-from-grace myths are really about?
* To express is to force something out of an aperture under pressure, which I find an unexpectedly apt description of how human language works. I suspect that telepathic interaction between humans would be fundamentally different, because it would be unnecessary for one person to get things out of their head before others could get those things into theirs.
(I'm thinking of Snow Crash, and the 'Sumerian language/Tower of Babel' hypothesis/myth that it's based on...)
The thing is, IIRC, Cain and Abel is one of the stories that was not only passed intact from the Sumerians, it was fairly pivotal, though it had a different ending - Though that may just be the losers talking. :) And, while we have artifacts, even clay artifacts, that are pre-Sumerian, I don't think we have any evidence of a language before then. Pictures (Lascaux and similar), but no words.
* To express is to force something out of an aperture under pressure, which I find an unexpectedly apt description of how human language works. I suspect that telepathic interaction between humans would be fundamentally different, because it would be unnecessary for one person to get things out of their head before others could get those things into theirs.
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The thing is, IIRC, Cain and Abel is one of the stories that was not only passed intact from the Sumerians, it was fairly pivotal, though it had a different ending - Though that may just be the losers talking. :) And, while we have artifacts, even clay artifacts, that are pre-Sumerian, I don't think we have any evidence of a language before then. Pictures (Lascaux and similar), but no words.
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