How did ancient Man communicate?

Answer 1

While we may never know what the first language was, some form of verbal communication did exist thousands of years ago, with Sanskrit (India) and Hebrew (Middle East) among the oldest languages that survived in some form. Back then, most cultures were oral; to cite one example, before the Hebrew Bible was compiled and written down, the Israelites used the story-telling skills of prophets and sages to preserve the stories, the religious doctrines, and the news of the what their leaders were doing; these story-tellers were very important to the culture, because they could remember and re-tell the stories, enabling the traditions to be transmitted to the next generation.

In addition to oral culture, there is also evidence that ancient men and women developed a form of writing (we know, for example, that Sumerians, Egyptians and Hebrews had written script-- a sort of picture-writing; archaeologists have also found pictures on the walls of caves, and these pictures seemed to tell a story of some kind). The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, while a religious rather than a historical story, still shows that thousands of years ago, people spoke different languages and in many cases, could not understand the language of another culture.

Thus, we know today that ancient men and women communicated through spoken language; early versions were probably very simple-- asking for food, for example, or telling where a hunter was going. Early languages may also have included signs and gestures. But as time passed, these languages expanded, becoming more complex and creating new and more elaborate vocabulary. Similarly, early written communication relied on pictures or symbols, but later writing used script or even alphabets. Ancient man communicated in various ways mostly through talking. For distance communication, they used things like pigeons, smoke and messengers to take messages to other places.