communication

   
     This post is coming to you later than usual because I've not been feeling well, so I'll try to make it extra entertaining to make up for it. As I read the chapter on communication I began to wonder about how early humans communicated. I know we used cave walls to preserve history in paintings but what I want to know is before the development of language did we also have something similar to the waggle dance for when we learned information about an animal we were hunting or found berries that weren't deadly? Maybe we just motioned for our tribe to follow and lead them. I kind of wonder why bees don't do that, since their waggle dance doesn't seem to be very effective in telling more than general direction and distance without odor cues. Maybe the hunter bees get tired. I bet flying is hard.
It's hard to know exactly how humans communicated before the written language was developed. I kind of wonder how language developed at all. Considering how similar we are to apes its probably better to look at what monkey type creatures do than bees. Perhaps language started with different calls for different predators like the vervet monkeys use and developed into more complex things. While reading about the signals relation to body type and size the book said that "the frequency of a vocalization, or its pitch, is often negatively related to body size." It talked about how their larynx is longer the bigger they are which means they can do different things sound wise based on their physiology. That made me wonder if the reason humans developed speech the way we did is only because of our physiology, and wonder if it's not more complex than animals speech, but the only one I can understand. Humans make mistakes all the time. Maybe the waggle dance is accurate and the bees searching for the food just aren't great at finding it for their own reasons not for the dance being inaccurate. I guess we'll have to do more bee tagging studies to truly know.