Many writers have speculated that the unprecedented success of our species was due to the development of language in prehistoric times. Our emergent ability to plan and carry out attacks on so-called megafauna, such as the giant sloth and the hairy mammoth, is thought to have contributed to their extinction. Construction of the earliest city-forts within historic time clearly demonstrates the cooperative effort to accomplish something enabled by language skills; clay tablets found at these sites verify that symbolic representation of words in writing was generally accepted by a local population twelve-thousand years ago. From this evidence we can infer … Continue reading The State Corrupts the Language