The human voice is our most useful and persuasive communications tool - we use it to express our hopes and fears, love and hate, joys and sorrows.
For most of our civilised existence, we were only able to do that with people in the same room, street or locality.
These are the most natural forms of communication - the ones that formed the building blocks for everything that followed.
The most basic way in which we communicate is in how we look and how we behave. These are instincts programmed into us as animals and that we call 'body language.'
Non-verbal communication is at the same time both subtle and very powerful. How we stand or sit, our expressions and gestures, the scents we emit - all communicate our feelings to other people in an unspoken way.
We can communicate desire, dislike, rage, joy, fear, confidence, and many other basic emotions.
We may not realise we are sending out these body signals - and others may not recognise them consciously. But behind the scenes and under the surface, the unspoken background 'chemistry' of body language plays a major role in how we relate to others and how they see us.
Learning to talk is one of the things we do by instinct - and with a little help from our parents. Latest studies suggest that babies learn the basic sounds that make up their language by the age of six months - long before they say their first words.
Newborn children speak a universal language - they can learn any language and can distinguish all of the different sounds we speak. But adults are language specialists - exclusive exposure to their native tongue makes it difficult for them to speak other languages. That's why Japanese infants can hear the difference between the English sounds 'la' and 'ra,' but Japanese adults can't.
Experiments have shown how important is the language tutoring role of parents. By talking 'motherese', distinguished by a high pitch, exaggerated intonation and clear pronunciation, parents help their babies learn the phonetic vowel and consonant sounds that are the building blocks of any language. So even if a mother looks a bit odd saying 'Goo goo gah gah' to her baby, she's actually starting the process of education!
Early systems of writing used drawn symbols to represent whole words or ideas. There might be one symbol meaning 'sun' and another meaning 'moon' for instance.
These writing forms are called 'pictographic' or 'ideographic' and include the cuneiforms of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the written symbols still used in the Chinese and Japanese languages and Mayan picture writing.
Although effective, systems like this are very cumbersome, needing thousands of different symbols to convey full meaning.
Around 3000 BC the Egyptians were using hieroglyphics - forms that are a cross between letters and symbols to represent different words. This is also known as 'logo-syllabic' writing. Similar systems developed later in the Aegean, in Anatolia (modern Turkey), in India and in China.
From these logo-syllabic systems, other peoples borrowed the basic forms to produce semi-alphabetic writing - a form for every component syllable in the language ('ba', 'ca', 'da' etc.)
The Greeks borrowed their writing system from the Phoenicians - and took the final step of separating the consonants from the vowels and writing each separately, arriving at the full alphabet around 800 BC.
The Romans later borrowed this alphabet in turn, adapted it into Latin - which then provided the basic alphabet for European civilisation.
How did we first learn to talk? How did we learn to organise the way we talked into a language?
These are fundamental issues - but there are still more questions than answers.
For example one theory - stating that language began as a way of warning fellow hunters of danger - runs against another - that it was women who evolved language when they were working together 'at home'.
When was language first developed? Some think it was about a million years ago, along with the bigger brain of homo erectus. Others consider it was only about 100,000 years ago, once big-brained homo sapiens had developed the vocal tracts that allowed them to speak.
One problem affects both theories - the part of our brain that controls speech is different from the one that controls the screeches and grunts of apes. In fact, it is just as likely that organised speech evolved out of sign language.
