The AHA Moment: My Personal Story

The AHA! Moment: My Personal Story

The Aha Moment: definition
The moment or instant at which the solution to a problem or other significant realization becomes clear.
Also The Aha! Moment
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aha_moment

My Definition:
The AHA! moment is when your disparate ideas suddenly rearrange themselves together into a new and insightful pattern.

An enigmatic Rembrandt etching, showing, perhaps, 

a thinker receiving a sudden insight.

It's something that every artist, writer, scientist, thinker hopes will happen sooner or later. It usually comes after an extended period of work in an effort to solve a difficult problem. Frustrated, a person gives up and focuses their mind elsewhere. Then suddenly something triggers an insight and the various disconnected pieces of the puzzle now come together to form one coherent picture. 

After seven years of writing this blog about the human experience of time, I had one of these moments while driving through drenching thunderstorms as I was fleeing a monster hurricane. 


SO HERE IS MY STORY:

I had just finished writing several historical eBooks for a client at Upwork.com about the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Neolithic Revolution, Greek Mythology and Galileo. Each 10,000 word eBook was long enough to go into some detail but short enough that I would not get bogged down in endless minutia. It was the perfect assignment for me -- because I like to look for the big overview, the big picture, while also finding substantial facts and historical events to back up my conclusions. And after writing these eBooks I was musing about the many theories and discoveries that had become part of civilization today.

Then I started to think about my own ideas concerning the human experience of time -- the purpose of this blog, DeconstructingTime. I have been working on this subject for seven years. I was confident that I had mapped out a pretty good set of ideas and yet at the same time, I felt there was something missing. I wanted a larger hypothesis that could tie many, if not most, of my ideas together.

Around this time I also had begun to entertain a new point of view about the human condition. Rather than thinking of us as civilized people who occasionally succumbed to animal behavior, I began to think of us as basically animals who were doing their best to be civilized. And this switch in perspective opened up an entirely new way of looking at things.

Fresh from my eBook research, I thought of Mendeleev who put together the first working chart of the elements that make up all matter, a chart that is now known as the periodic table. He had put each element and what he knew about it, such as its atomic weight, on a card and then laid out these cards as though he was playing a kind of solitaire. He did this for a number of years until one night he had a dream and saw the entire periodic table almost perfectly arranged. 

"I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place
did a correction later seem necessary." 
Dmitri Mendeleev

Mendeleev (left) and his notes about the periodic table. His work has become the basis for our understanding of the material world and is considered a milestone in scientific thought.

One of my own personal quests has been to go back as far as possible in history to find the moment when we Homo sapiens began to think about time in terms of past, present, and future and then, as a result, were able to make plans. I assumed that before that, like virtually all animals, Homo sapiens were locked into the present, into the here and now, and that they lived entirely in the moment. So before this, we/they could not plan. 

I also knew that after perhaps hundreds of thousands of years when we/they had emerged from their instinctual animal existence, they did develop modern languages with a full set of expressions, concepts, and metaphors to describe and work with time in a linear fashion, i.e., past, present, and future. And this allowed planning, coordinating and sharing, i.e., all the things that made Homo sapiens so powerful and dominant on the planet. In other words, language gave us the tools to work with time.

But the period in between our original animal existence and a fully developed language was a dark mystery. I could not imagine an early language nor could I imagine an initial or early developing sense of time.

Then as chance would have it, a huge hurricane, Hurricane Florence, threatened the home where I lived, and I had to leave in the middle of the night after getting an ominous phone message from the government. There was a mandatory evacuation order for my area of North Carolina.

Once I had loaded the car, locked up the house, and was on the road at 2 AM, I began to think about my work on the subject of time. Alone in my car with virtually no traffic, it was kind of dreamy but foreboding as well. To give myself something to think about I decided to talk to myself and see if I could make some headway. 

I have always been interested in the passage of time, starting perhaps with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets which give the best definition of time that I know of. As I have quoted many times before in this blog, Eliot points out that time is always now -- and without the now moment time would not happen.

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards;

At the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance,

And there is only the dance.

...

And all is always now

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1936,  Four Quartets

In the 1980s I had studied the time lapse photos of Eadweard Muybridge for two years and then made computer art based on his study of human locomotion. And as a photographer for fifty years, I understood time and timing because photography concerns itself with both. More recently I created an extensive study of what I call time-flow photography, photography in which I took pictures with long shutter speeds to show blur, motion, and the passage of time.

A reworked digital image from Muybridge's 

Woman in Motion photography series.

A candid photograph created entirely with slow shutter speed 

'time-flow' effects and not with software.

I had also made the connection between language and our concepts of time. I had written a blog about a year ago on that subject. In the process of writing, it became clear to me that language was in many ways the key, as it gave us humans the tools to conceive of time in complicated ways and also to express those concepts to others. But that was as far as I got.

How Our Concept of Time Is Embedded & Derived from Our Language 

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2017/02/concept-of-time-embedded-in-language.html

For words are to thought what tools are to work; 

the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.

Will Durant, History of Civilization: Part 1

Then in the occasional bursts of heavy rain that made it almost impossible to see the road with my headlights, even though the wipers were going full speed, the first clue came to me. 

A hurricane track over the coast 

in North Carolina where I live.

I remembered reading that there was a tribe in the Amazon that spoke a very different language -- some called it a more basic language -- which no linguist or researcher had come across before. It did not follow any of the normally accepted rules that virtually all other languages followed. 

Around dawn after five hours on the dark road, I reached my destination, the home of a long time friend, Harry. Harry lived in Durham and had graciously allowed me and my wife, who was already there, to stay with him.


AFTER THE STORM

So my lonely night journey to escape the storm brought together a number of ideas.

I announced to Harry the following morning that I was going to use this time, while we waited out the storm, to find out about this tribe. A quick search of the Internet told me that the tribe was called the Piraha and that Daniel Everett, a kind of revolutionary linguist, was the accepted expert of their culture and language.

After watching everything I could on YouTube, listening to Dan Everett's TED talks, and reading numerous articles by Everett and others on the Internet, there it was: The Missing Piece. 

When I had read about the tribe years earlier, Everett had not formulated a comprehensive hypothesis of language. But now he had and to my incredible surprise, it was a perfect fit with my own ideas. It turned out that about six months earlier -- but about a year after I had written my own post about the connection between time and language -- Everett had written a book entitled, How Language Began. 

Without realizing it, I had laid out cards in my mind, as Mendeleev had done, yet there was this big blank card in the middle. But now the Piraha and the ideas of Dan Everett had filled this gap. 

Time reference is a universal property of language...
Jacqueline Lecarme, PH. D., Linguistics

The following is what I grasped from Everett's ideas:
Language is much much older than previously thought and goes back to the predecessors of us humans (Homo sapiens); it goes back to Homo erectus more than a million years earlier. Everett decided that altogether there were probably three language stages: G1, G2, and G3. The languages today are all G3 except that of the Piraha which is an earlier language, a G2 language. Everett suspects there are many more in the world, they just have not been understood properly. 

We use language in a sophisticated manner without realizing that it has given us 

the symbols to work with time in complex ways.

Language, however, began with the earliest language, G1, which was spoken by Homo erectus a million years ago, and which gradually developed due to the cultural and survival needs of these people. 

I always felt that the human sense of time must have developed slowly (meaning a million or so years) but there was no evidence to support that. And so it seemed unlikely that we would ever discover an early language since it was probably spoken by prehistoric people who had left no record. In addition, it was generally assumed that language began with us, Homo sapiens, and that it might not have developed until relatively recently, such as one hundred thousand years ago. Everett's timetable, however, pushed the start of language back much further.

NOTE: While I believe language may have taken a million or so years to develop, this time table is not crucial for my hypothesis. A shorter timetable could definitely be possible. What's important is the sequence and nature of the development of language and the concepts of time as I have outlined them here.

So with Dan's hypothesis and the clear evidence of the Piraha's basic language, it now seemed to me that the history of language was quite different. A living language of the contemporary tribe, the Piraha, with a very old tradition of hunting-and-gathering showed what an earlier language could sound like. 


THE AHA MOMENT

The AHA moment came when I realized that not only had Dan Everett found an earlier language but the language and culture were entirely based in the moment and in the here and now -- in the Immediacy Of Experience Principle, as Dan called it. 

This language and culture had a very different sense of time and that understanding of time was anchored in the present -- a sense of time that was much closer to instinctual animal behavior. Since my work has been about the human experience of time and how the concept and experience of time have changed as lifestyles and technology changed, the Piraha sense of time was exactly what I had predicted if an earlier language could be found. This was especially true for people living a day-to-day hunter-gatherer existence as early humans must have done. 

And also if that was true, then a hypothetical earliest G1 language would also be based in the here and now with an even greater sense of immediacy. Until I learned about the Piraha, I could not imagine an early language. But now because of their language, it was possible to project back to the beginning and sketch out how the first stages would be put together and also what their sense of time would be like. 

------------------------- EUREKA! -------------------------

QUICK SUMMARY OF MY AHA! UNDERSTANDING: As we know, all languages reference time but the earliest languages probably had a very different concept of time than we have today. These early languages had a here-and-now immediate sense of time that then took hundreds of thousands of years to develop into the modern linear sense of time.

It turned out that the Piraha language provided the crucial intermediate point in between our early animal behavior and today's fully developed modern languages. 

So here is how my ideas fit so nicely with those of Everett.

This is a recreation of Australopithecus who is considered our distant ancestor

and who almost certainly had not developed language at this point.

Since we were animals first and humans later, there must have been a time when we humans lived like the animals, i.e., entirely in the present. In other words, past and future did not exist along with planning and coordinating. So the human sense of time must have evolved gradually from an animal state and done so in coordination with the gradual development of language. This was because language was the primary tool that could conceptualize time and then allow the sharing of plans and the manipulation of time. 

It was clear from the stone tool evidence left by Homo erectus that they understood processes which required a sense of time and that this knowledge was passed down from generation to generation. 

These sophisticated stone tools have been accurately dated back to 300,000 BCE. 

They were made by the earliest Homo sapiens. Homo erectus tools are much older.

An early sense of human time would be part animal that lived in the present and part human that conceived of time in a limited way and that coincided with Everett's language stages. And now I could make an educated guess about the concepts of time in each language stage. Early time concepts would be very different from the sense of time we experience today. 

In other words, early members of the genus Homo invented our concepts of time and then during the long development of these ideas, there were markedly different concepts of time. These depended on the needs of the culture, the environment, the technology, and the changing weather. The sense of time we have today in the industrial world is quite different from the sense of time in the Neolithic/agricultural era which in turn was quite different from the sense of time when people lived in tribes and were nomadic and/or hunters and gatherers in the forest or the jungle.

These are members of the hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon today who live by the Immediacy Of Experience Principle according to Daniel Everett. 

This means their concept of time is anchored in the near-present

and quite different from the modern world. 
Everett also believes they speak a G2 language 
which might be an earlier form of spoken language.

And with that my hypothesis of the human-sense-of-time now had a pedigree, meaning that human ideas about time had a clear beginning and that they then continued to develop right up to today. And it was completely intertwined with the development of language because language provided the tools for working with time.

About a month after this, I formulated "A Comprehensive Hypothesis About the Evolution of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time." In this paper, I outlined a basic sequence for the development of language and the development of time concepts. The AHA! moment had now turned into a full-blown hypothesis. Voila!

A Comprehensive Hypothesis About the 

Evolution of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/11/comprehensive-hypothesis-human-sense-of-time.html

After this theory about language, I went one step further and expanded these ideas to include culture, technology, and belief systems.

An Expanded Hypothesis That Relates the History of the Human-Experience-Of-Time

to Culture, Technology and Belief Systems in Addition to Language

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2019/01/expanded-hypothesis-about-human-experience-of-time.html

The many languages of the world.

AFTERWORD

Archimedes in his bath, just before his Eureka moment.

The most famous Eureka story occurred when Archimedes of Syracuse around 250 BCE was trying to discover a way to determine whether an intricate gold crown was really solid gold as the King of Syracuse, Hieron, had ordered from a metalsmith. The king suspected that it was partly silver which was hidden behind the gold and so ordered Archimedes to determine its true composition. According to legend, Archimedes had been struggling with the problem for some time and finally gave up and took a bath. When he got into the full bath, he realized that water now overflowed due to the density of his body. Then in a flash, he understood that placing an object in water would displace the water and that the volume of displaced water would allow him to make a calculation about the density of the metal -- since silver and gold had different densities. And that was the Eureka moment. Eureka means, "I have found it" and according to legend Archimedes forgot that he was naked, jumped from his bath and ran through the streets shouting, "Eureka! Eureka!" And, BTW, it turned out that the crown was not entirely gold, so the king was justified in his suspicion.

Galileo had an AHA! moment when he saw a lamp swinging from a long cord while he was at a church service. He then measured the time of its swings with his pulse. His work led to the first formulas that included a complex understanding of time.

After frustrating months of work, Einstein either got in a trolley or imagined that he did, as he had ridden it many times. In any case, the ringing of the bell by the ancient clock (behind the trolley) in Bern Switzerland triggered a vision in which the trolley was suddenly moving at the speed of light. Einstein then realized that the time showing on the Bern clock-face could never catch up with the trolley. And this became the basis for his Special Theory of Relativity.  

MORE ABOUT MENDELEEV & THE PERIODIC TABLE


The Mendeleev insight is particularly interesting because it was not entirely correct but was close enough that it eventually led to both a precise understanding of the nature of each element and also how these elements came to exist. So the periodic table became a basic road map of all matter that makes up everything that exists.

If all the elements are arranged in the order of their atomic weights, a periodic repetition of properties is obtained. This is expressed by the law of periodicity. 

— Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev

NOTE: Mendeleev was close but not quite right. It turned out that elements needed to be arranged in order of their atomic number (the number of protons) and not their weights. But the atomic number was not well understood until almost 45 years later.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. 

C.P. Snow

The eighth element, starting from a given one, is a kind of repetition of the first, like the eighth note of an octave in music.

— John Alexander Newlands

Mendeleev's insight led eventually to theories about how each element was created. It turns out they were mostly created (cooked as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says next) in the centers of stars and the explosions of stars. So Mendeleev's concept reached far into the nature of mater itself.

One of the great triumphs of 20th Century astrophysics, was tracing the elements of your body, of all the elements around us, to the actions of stars—that crucible in the centers of stars that cooked basic elements into heavier elements, light elements into heavy elements. (I say “cooked”—I mean thermonuclear fusion.) The heat brings them together, gets you bigger atoms, that then do other interesting chemical things, fleshing out the contents of the Periodic Table. 

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

MORE ABOUT THE IDEAS IN THIS BLOG

For people who are not familiar with this blog over the last seven years, here are some of my most important blog-posts:

== In my most popular blog-article I wrote that humans have a unique sense of time, an enhanced sense such as dogs have with smell, due to the prefrontal cortex in the brain. Dan Everett seemed to agree with this idea in his book How Language Began published more than three years after my blog article. This blog-article is my most important one and has been viewed and downloaded over 7000 times. 
https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/08/animal-senses-compared-to-human-sense.html

== Another blog-article made the point that all languages include ways of expressing time and conceptualizing time. This blog-article would become a key part of my thinking.
https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2017/02/concept-of-time-embedded-in-language.html

== I have also shown that Neolithic people had a precise pre-scientific method for measuring the yearly seasonal cycles which was key to their sense of time.
https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2015/03/computing-winter-solstice-at-newgrange.html

And while I was pleased with these different pieces of research, I was looking for an overall hypothesis that would tie many of these ideas together.

Toward a Comprehensive Hypothesis About the Development of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time Based in Part on Daniel Everett's 'How Language Began'

Toward a Comprehensive Hypothesis

About the Development of Language

and the Human-Sense-Of-Time

Based in Part on Daniel Everett's 'How Language Began'

By Rick Doble

PREFACE

To my astonishment, my previous blog-post that I uploaded as a separate document on Academia.edu has been well received. It was recommended by four people and has gotten almost 300 views and over a 100 downloads.

So following up on this article about Daniel Everett's book How Time Began and its relation to my ideas of the human experience of time, I have now made a full outline of my concepts that dovetail with his. Please see my earlier blog article for more background information.

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/10/everett-how-language-began-and-human-time-keeping.html

Or view the article on Academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/37624870/How_Language_Began_and_the_Human_Understanding_of_Time_Daniel_Everetts_New_Theories_About_the_Evolution_of_Language?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest

____________________________________

INTRODUCTION

THE BASIC PREMISE

My basic premise is quite simple. Early humans (genus Homo) emerged from living instinctively in the present to developing language and time concepts that allowed them to manage time in increasingly sophisticated ways. Language gave humans the tools to work with time, to share, to coordinate and to plan. Without these time-tools, the development of farming and civilization would have been impossible.

LANGUAGE FROM THE BEGINNING MUST HAVE INCLUDED TIME EXPRESSIONS

No language could have developed without an initial early understanding of time. Period. All verbs, for example, describe actions which occur over time. As language developed, the ability to describe time and express time became more sophisticated, although different languages handled the problem differently. In Mandarin Chinese today, for example, all verbs are present tense but the context describes the time frame. So in Chinese one might say, "He runs today. He runs yesterday." In other languages, the time indicator is in the verb tense.

THE INVENTION OF HUMAN TIME

Humans invented their own concept of time just as they invented language. While time exists independently and objectively, the way that humans conceive and work with time is uniquely human. We have to speak of time in metaphors such as spatial metaphors, i.e., the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us. Or she has been through a lot. So what follows next is another metaphor that explains how we work with time.

Water, like time, exists objectively and independently. Animals must find watering holes where they can drink, or find new watering holes when one dries up; they find rivers to bathe in and shelter when it is pouring rain. When we humans were in our animal stage, we used water in the same way. Then we learned to control it. So we carried water in jugs, drank from cups and boiled water. Soon farmers learned how to irrigate their fields. Then we learned how to store large quantities of water and to create plumbing that went to a number of locations as was done in Rome 2000 years ago. Eventually, we were able to put water under tremendous pressure as in a fire hose. Today steam turbines run nuclear submarines. So while water is still water, in this example, the way that we use water is uniquely human. 

And the way that we use, shape, mold and describe time, I submit, is also uniquely human. We have mathematically divided the day into 24 hours with 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute which is artificially computed by our man-made clocks which are now in sync with an atomic clock. While this works very well, our methods for dividing time and then keeping track of time are human inventions. 

Photo of first atomic bomb 0.053 sec after detonation on 16 July 1945. 

This bomb was code-named Trinity and exploded in 10 millionths of a second after it was triggered.

____________________________________

TO UNDERSTAND HOW CIVILIZED TIME BEGAN FOR THE GENUS HOMO, 

MOMENTARY TIME MUST BE UNDERSTOOD

Using the general timeline for the development of language as proposed by Daniel Everett, I have added my own timetable for the evolution of the human concept of time. Everett believes that language started with Homo erectus more than a million years ago, so I will start at that point as well.

I believe that civilized time as we experience it today (which is continuous time or time as a continuum) evolved hand-in-hand with the development of language. However, to understand this development, the starting point  (the point of departure from animal behavior)  needs to be understood. Otherwise, the development of language in the genus Homo is hard to comprehend. The starting point is that animals live in the moment. 

Animals are tuned into cyclical time such as a dog expecting to be fed by her owner at the same time each day, or birds settling into bushes at sunset or flocks of birds migrating in the fall. Yet cyclical time is quite different from linear time and us humans are the only animal that has been able to comprehend time in this manner.

The following abstract is from a detailed study about the animal perception of time and makes the point that animals are stuck in time, meaning they cannot grasp linear time, they cannot put past, present and future events on a linear timeline with a concept of 'when'. We are the only animal that understands 'when' in any detail.

Are Animals Stuck in Time?

William A. Roberts, University of Western Ontario

Abstract

People can time travel cognitively because they can remember events having occurred at particular times in the past (episodic memory) and because they can anticipate new events occurring at particular times in the future. The ability to assign points in time to events arises from human development of a sense of time and its accompanying time-keeping technology. [ED: In this paper] the hypothesis is advanced that animals are cognitively stuck in time; that is, they have no sense of time and thus have no episodic memory or ability to anticipate long-range future events. Research on animals’ abilities to detect time of day, track short time intervals, remember the order of a sequence of events, and anticipate future events are considered, and it is concluded that the stuck-in-time hypothesis is largely supported by the current evidence.

https://www.msu.edu/course/psy/962/snapshot.afs/Roberts%20(2002)%20-%20Are%20animals%20stuck%20in%20time_epidodic%20memory.pdf

A deep-sea fish has probably no means of apprehending the existence of water; 

it is too uniformly immersed in it...

Sir Oliver Lodge, British scientist

Would a fish understand the concept of wet? I doubt it.

Rick Doble

An early member of Homo erectus would probably not be aware of time or the present moment. Like the deep-sea fish, he/she would be so totally immersed in the flow of time, it would be so much a part of life, that the person would not be conscious of it.

So to step from the world of the immediate present into a world where time has a past, present, and future and where time is a continuum and one is aware of the now moment, is like Alice stepping into Wonderland or Alice going Through the Looking Glass. 

To understand how Homo erectus was able to conceive of time, to invent a concept of time, and then invent a language to communicate about time took perhaps a million years. It was a long and difficult process. 

TO UNDERSTAND OUR OWN SENSE OF CONTINUOUS TIME, 

WE NEED TO FIRST UNDERSTAND HOW TIME EXISTS ONLY IN THE MOMENT

“Alice: How long is forever? White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”     

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

There are some simple basic facts about time which might seem obvious but which often are missed. I have found that the obvious is frequently the hardest to explain. 

In a sense, there is only now, right now. As TS Eliot stated so well, "Except for the point, the still point, [of the now moment] There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. ...All is always now."

To say it another way: nothing existed in the past unless it existed in the now moment, nothing exists in the present unless it exists in the now moment, and nothing will exist in the future unless it will exist in the now moment. 

Now is the basic building block of time and without it, time does not happen. So the primary state of time is now. 

But we, as modern humans, have learned to work with time as a continuous ribbon, to understand that things we do in the past have consequences for the future. From at least the age of six, when we first go to school, we are taught to build on our knowledge and our skills. Things we did yesterday will be the foundation for things we do today and tomorrow. Many people see their lives as a building that is constructed by their dedication to work that adds to their career, for example. 

And because of this strong cultural bias for planning and time management, many find it hard to conceptualize a different way of understanding time. But that is exactly what I am asking you to do in the next part of this post.

WHY IS IT HARD TO LIVE FOR THE MOMENT?

Live for the moment... Indeed, all non-human species do it all the time without even being aware of doing it. But it is precisely awareness, which distinguishes human beings from other species, that makes it so hard for us to live in the present.

Human psychology is evolutionary hard-wired to live in the past and the future. Other species have instincts and reflexes to help with their survival, but human survival relies very much on learning and planning. You can’t learn without living in the past, and you can’t plan without living in the future. 

The other reason...is that our intelligent cognition simply denies its existence. Our mind views time as a continuous and linear process. Because it is continuous, any millisecond before the present moment is already past and any millisecond later is already a future.  

Eyal Winter Ph.D., Why Is It Hard To Live For The Moment?, Psychology Today  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-smart/201609/why-is-it-hard-live-the-moment

A STUDY FOUND THAT CHIMPANZEES LIVE IN THE MOMENT 

AND SO ARE BETTER AT MOMENTARY TASKS THAN HUMANS

Animals live in the moment, for the most part, and as a result are better at momentary tasks according to one study. As reported in an article from the American Association For The Advancement Of Science, recent studies have shown that animals may actually be quicker and more skilled at momentary tasks than humans. 

"It would be extremely rare to find a human with the “extraordinary working memory” of a chimpanzee...but the reasons for this may stem from a tradeoff between memory and language." [ED: memory mentioned here indicates the human preoccupation with time]

“Chimps are living in the world of here and now,” Matsuzawa said. “We are living in the world, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, trying to understand the meaning of what we see, and bringing the information back to friends and families and colleagues to share the experience.”

Becky Ham,  For Better and Worse, Chimpanzee Minds Are Much Like Ours AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2013/0214_primate_cognition.shtml

WHILE 'NOW' SEEMS OBVIOUS TO US, IT IS ANYTHING BUT

But our discussion of the now moment is far from over. The words 'now' or 'moment' or 'present' or 'immediate' are themselves concepts. These concepts make no sense unless a person can understand what they represent. Before these words, humans lived with an unaware experience of time that simply swept by. 

To say 'now' is to be aware and conscious of the passage of time. This basic crucial step was the divide between the animal nature of Homo erectus and the beginnings of civilized human nature. Thinking 'now' puts a person outside of time, it removes a person from the flow of time. That our ancestors were able to make these first steps is remarkable, and even more remarkable that perhaps a million years later, we have developed the concepts of time that we have.

'Now' is an abstract concept, a human concept, and a difficult concept. Why is it difficult? Simple. Now is always changing. It is never the same. It is a moving point of reference and our understanding of time has to keep moving with it. What I just wrote is now past and what you will read later in this essay is in your future (if you keep reading). Yesterday has a different meaning today than it will tomorrow.  

'Now' is the critical concept because everything else in time derives from it. 

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'

Into the future

Steve Miller 

Although we adults live in a time continuum, modern people still have an important need to experience the moment. When we are in the moment, our senses are heightened and our experiences become more intense. The immediacy of the moment floods our being. This feeds a need of our animal nature to return to our roots. To feel fully alive we need to experience the now moment from time to time and I believe we must do so in quite primal ways. At rock concerts many people are swept up in the sound, rhythm and crowd excitement. Music and tribal gatherings are perhaps as old if not older than language. So these concerts are reminiscent of our primitive past. Sports events, especially team sports such as football and basket ball, allow a spectator today to become immersed in the moment of action, often shouting, yelling, and gesturing -- recalling, perhaps, primal memories of the hunt when we lived in the wild. And then, of course, is the most fundamental and primal of all human activities, sex. For many people during sex, time stops or seems to evaporate. 

THE BEGINNINGS OF A TIME CONCEPT

Nevertheless when this prehistoric sense of time did begin to develop, it was quite different from modern time, the time that you and I live with everyday. Just as you would be hard pressed to survive in a prehistoric culture if you were suddenly time-traveled back to a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers a million years ago, you would also have a hard time dealing with their concept of time. I believe their concept of time was much more immediate and much more grounded in the present. 

I say all of this because most people I have talked to simply think that time is, well, just time. And it does not matter if this time occurred a million years ago or today, time is after all the same. In a chronological sense this is true but in a human sense, it is false. While one day a million years ago lasts as long as one today, we and these prehistoric peoples do not experience it and live within its constraints in the same manner. In fact, the two experiences of time are worlds apart. I say all of this to set the stage for my ideas about the beginnings of the human-sense-of-time.

But wait! There is still more. In order for Homo erectus to carve out the initial beginnings of the human-sense-of-time, something else crucial had to occur. People had to work on their ability to remember things including words and events. Memory must have expanded at the same rate that language developed. 

To conceive of time, we must use metaphors. Time is invisible; it is not even as tangible or apparent as air or wind. Since language generally uses spatial metaphors to describe time, I think that the metaphor of carving out an expanse of time from the narrow confines of the now moment is a good metaphor.

There is direct evidence that at least some prehistoric people had an incredible memory. As I pointed out in a blog I wrote six years ago, a 'caveman', in a dark cave hundreds of feet from the entrance, painted a clearly recognizable beautifully drawn bison in color that he only could have done from memory. I am talking about the bison in the Cave of Altamira in Spain. The painting was painted perhaps 20,000 years ago. See my blog on this subject.

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-genius-of-cavemen.html

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OUTLINE OF A COMPREHENSIVE HYPOTHESIS

ABOUT THE HUMAN-SENSE-OF-TIME

Inspired by Daniel Everett's ideas about the development of language, I have mapped out stages for the development of time concepts in human cultures which I believe would have coincided with the development of language.

A SUMMARY OF EVERETT'S IDEAS ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

Unlike most modern linguists, Everett believes the development of language began much earlier than previously thought. It began perhaps two million years ago with the appearance of Homo erectus (Upright man) who was an early ancestor of us modern humans who only appeared about 200,000 years ago. 

Daniel Everett

He came to this conclusion after studying the very difficult language of the hunter-gatherer Piraha who live in the Amazon. The language uses only the present tense and it does not allow phrases to be nested or inserted within a sentence -- known as recursion in linguistics. So basically it is a language of direct independent sentences. Instead of saying, for example, "This is the house that Jack built." The Piraha might say "This is the house" -- referring to a specific house in the village, followed by "Jack builds this house." This directness and sense of immediacy of the Piraha have been called the 'immediacy of experience principle' by Everett who speaks Piraha fluently and is the acknowledged expert of this language. This language reflects the Piraha's point of view that everything must be related to direct experience. So they have no creation myths, for example, which again is very unusual. Dan eventually realized that he had come across a very old basic language -- possibly a kind of language that had proceeded modern languages -- that might point the way back to the original development of language.

Members of the Piraha tribe.

It dawned on Daniel Everett that he had come upon a people who had preserved a civilization virtually unchanged for thousands, godknew-how-many thousands, of years. 

Tom Wolfe, The Origins Of Speech, Harper's Magazine, August 2016

With the discovery of a new category of language, that of the Piraha, Daniel Everett has proposed three basic stages for the development of language:

G1: A basic language spoken by Homo erectus, our ancestor, beginning perhaps more than a million years ago

G2: An intermediate language of immediacy like that of the Piraha

G3: A modern language which uses recursion, verb tenses and ways to express time

OUTLINE OF THE HUMAN-SENSE-OF-TIME STAGES

What follows next are my time stages, T0, T1, T2, T3, T4 that I believe developed along with Everett's language stages.

T0: The bare beginnings of time and early speech:

The larger brain of Homo erectus and the species that led up to Homo sapiens may have had enhanced cognitive abilities that allowed a consideration of time, the beginnings of words and the beginnings of memory. This initial capability could have developed over a million-plus years. In was in this stage that early people began to break away from living in the now moment and began to live with a different sense of time.

T1: The earliest language of Homo erectus:

This language was probably centered around the now moment; the language strung words together like beads on a string with minimal grammar as Everett has suggested.

T2: Early nomadic, hunter-gatherer time of Homo sapiens: 

This language was probably like the Piraha language; this language would have basic time concepts as needed to plan, share, coordinate, and relocate but would be primarily grounded in recent experience.

T3: Agricultural, neolithic time:

During this period people achieved an accurate measurement of the year and timekeeping of annual cycles, accurate enough for growing crops and harvesting. It was an understanding of time that was tied to the yearly solar cycle. This was probably a G3 language, but the concept of time was quite different from the next stage that I have proposed, i.e., T4. Neolithic time was cyclical, season to season and year to year. T4 or Industrial Time, is mostly linear where time continues into the future in a straight line.

T4: Man-made time; industrial time, factory time, modern time: 

Our modern time is as man-made as cell phones. It is time that is precise down to seconds for ordinary people and down to nanoseconds (a billionth of a second) for computers. Time is coordinated worldwide with mandated time zones and atomic clocks. People are expected to show up on time at work and to understand work schedules and hours that businesses operate. Many things are time-stamped such as receipts, cell phone calls, and digital photographs. T4 is primarily linear time, although annual celebrations such as Halloween and Christmas are honored and are part of cyclical time.

T5: Future Time:

The civilizations of the future will have to adopt a forward-looking sense of time. They will have to plan fifty or a hundred years into the future. They will need to make plans for climate and environmental changes and also for the consequences of their industrial production.

"Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels;
only when the clock stops does time come to life."   

William Faulkner

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EXPLANATION OF A COMPREHENSIVE HYPOTHESIS

ABOUT THE HUMAN-SENSE-OF-TIME

I agree with Daniel Everett that language was shaped and developed by the culture, but that culture was also shaped and influenced by its environment and by its technology. So the development of language also reflected the technology, such as  Neolithic or new stone age technology.

T0 TIME: HOW THE HUMAN SENSE OF TIME BEGAN

I have suggested that starting perhaps two million years ago early members of the genus Homo may have had an actual sense of time, an enhanced sense of time, just as some animals have an enhanced sense of smell. Their larger brains and unique prefrontal cortex led to their ability to master sequential operations and to make tools -- which required a sense of time. This sense of time then evolved, developed and expanded up until today.  See my most popular article about this topic which has registered more than 6500 views and downloads. 

Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time

http://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/08/animal-senses-compared-to-human-sense.html

Daniel Everett agrees that the unique part of the human brain, the prefrontal cortex, was critical for processes. sequences and planning. Yet he does not go one step further and say that it therefore must have played a part in the human concept of time -- although these processes. sequences and planning could not  have occurred without a basic sense of time. Also notice that he says the ability to accomplish sequential actions and toolmaking prepared the brain for language -- which to my way of thinking means that a concept of time preceded the development of language.

From Daniel Everett's How Language Began, page 82 & page 96:
-- The growth of the prefrontal cortex, itself associated with toolmaking and sequential actions, helped to prepare the brain for language, by providing the cognitive firepower necessary for actions where procedures or improvised sequences are required. 
-- The manufacture of tools requires planning, imagination (having an image of what the final tools should look like) and, at least eventually, communication of some sort for instructing others in how to make tools. The sequential operations call upon the prefrontal cortex and produce cultural selection pressure for more cortical horsepower, more smarts.

T1 & T2 TIME: THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE & TIME CONCEPTS

To make a convincing case about an early language, I must work backward from what we do know to what we can logically guess. We know very little about the language or the symbolisms of Homo erectus who may have been the first members of the genus Homo to use language as Daniel Everett has suggested. 

But if we look at the G2 language of the Piraha, an overriding characteristic jumps out -- one which Daniel Everett has made a key point in his study of the Piraha. The language, and the culture and the way the language is expressed is ruled by what he called the 'immediacy of experience principle'.

Everett says that "the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality" means that "the Pirahã accept as real only that which they observe, their speech consists only of direct assertions." For something to be accepted as true or worth considering a person has to have experienced it, he has to know someone who experienced it or she was able to logically deduce something from existing evidence. 

John Colapinto, The Interpreter, The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2

Unlike in English, in Pirahã speakers must state their source of information: they cannot be ambiguous. Pirahã also uses suffixes that communicate evidentiality, a category lacking in English grammar. One such suffix, -xáagahá, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question...Other verbal suffixes indicate that an action is deduced from circumstantial evidence, or based on hearsay. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

This 'immediacy of experience principle' is central to the language and to the way that the Piraha think. And in connection with my hypothesis about the human-sense-of-time, this 'immediacy of experience principle' indicates that the Piraha language is grounded in the present and that recent time is most important. But this immediacy goes even further. There are no past tense verbs and there are no numbers. So things like hours of the day or two days from now could not be said by the Piraha. 

Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the present," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.

Rafaela von Bredow, Living without Numbers or Time, Spiegel Online

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/brazil-s-piraha-tribe-living-without-numbers-or-time-a-414291.html

Their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within their direct personal experience, and therefore there is no undefined past or future, only their current personal experience and living memory. They have a concept and expression Xibipíío, meaning “experiential liminality”, which describes something “experiencable” or experienced. They do not value past or future, but instead focus on now, i.e. current  Xibipíío =  current experience. The tribe does not understand unexperienced past; i.e. if you want to say that “he went fishing last week”, Pirahã people will not believe you. First, because such concept of weeks does not exist, instead time is relative and you would have to say that it happened “small time” or “big time” ago. 

Viktorija Gorcakovaite, Happiest Tribe on Earth

http://fameiva.com/happiest-tribe-on-earth/

It is important to note that the Piraha language is not 'primitive' or less useful than modern language. The Piraha language even has some sophisticated features that modern languages do not have such as "suffixes that communicate evidentiality."  The language is good enough for its purpose while allowing its members to be firmly rooted in the here and now which is essential for the tribal, hunter-gatherer existence. The Piraha face extreme dangers on a daily basis from poisonous snakes, spiders, scorpions, electric eels, alligators -- you name it. They need their full attention in the moment to avoid these dangers which is why their culture is so present-oriented. The same was probably true, only more so, for a G1 language.

What this means is simple. The earliest G1 language, i.e., a language before the Piraha type G2 language, would have been even more immediate. Over perhaps a million years humans would have gradually emerged from living in the moment to a sense of time that was still quite immediate but that contained a sense of the past and an idea of the future -- a concept that the entire tribe would have needed to share so that it could work as a group with coordinated activities. 

In his book, How Language Began, Daniel Everett has indicated that there is considerable evidence that Homo erectus was capable of planning. And because of that, he is quite sure they had a language. But planning can only occur if there is a shared concept of time as well.  

However, initially, this sense of time would have been quite narrow. The earliest language would have been a language that developed from a people who were part animal and in the immediate moment, and part human. The human part of their brain would have contained the earliest awareness of the passage of time.

The concept of time and a conscious realization of the 'now moment' would have taken perhaps a million years to develop so that the tribe could have a common language. While we take these things for granted, these were huge steps which required an extended period to evolve.

A recently published study by the top rated research University of Edinburgh in the UK stated that, "As far back as 40,000 years ago, humans kept track of time using relatively sophisticated knowledge of the stars."  University of Edinburgh, Prehistoric Cave Art Suggests Ancient Use of Complex Astronomy, Sciencedaily.Com   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181127111025.htm

At some point when seasonal time was understood and accurately measured, timekeeping was seen as spiritual, godly, and perhaps even a gift from the gods. While we cannot say exactly when the following occurred, it provides clear evidence of the importance of time to early civilizations. 
In the first book of the Bible (a sacred text to Christians, Jews and Muslims), in Genesis 14, (Common English Bible):God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night. They will mark events, sacred seasons, days, and years."  
In Greek mythology, Prometheus, the father of mankind, also taught men how to tell time from the stars. 
Prometheus said "Listen to the miseries that beset mankind--how they were witless before and I made them have sense and endowed them with reason... [They] managed everything without judgment, until I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings, which are difficult to distinguish." [ED: i.e., how to tell time and the timing of the seasons by the stars]   This quote is from the ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, 5th Century BCE  (trans. Weir Smyth)  http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanPrometheus.html

T3 TIME: AGRICULTURAL, NEOLITHIC TIME

Because of their understanding and perhaps an obsession with time, it is likely that most Neolithic agricultural languages were early G3 languages with the full ability to place past, present and future events on a timeline. And while we do not have much evidence about Paleolithic culture when it comes to timekeeping, we do have significant clear evidence from the Neolithic era.

From Newgrange in Ireland to the Goseck Circle in Germany (along with another such 140 'circular enclosures'), to the monumental works in Malta, there is clear evidence that these cultures had developed sophisticated solar instruments. These instruments and monuments and passage tombs were able to indicate with precision when the winter solstice occurred. 

The passage tomb at Newgrange Ireland, for example, was carefully constructed so that sunlight would enter the tomb and light the passageway down to the end only at the time of the winter solstice.

Why was this so important? These agricultural societies needed to know the exact time of the sun's lowest point so that they could plan their planting and so that they could reconcile their calendars. 

The earliest known calendars were generally lunar/solar and so it appears likely that Neolithic people had lunar/solar calendars. The moon's cycles were used for timekeeping month to month and the sun's cycles were used for determining the seasons and timekeeping year to year. Unfortunately, the lunar and solar cycles do not mesh. This meant that these societies had to develop a way to bring their calendars back into sync each year and they did this, not through calculations -- which the Greeks and Romans would do later -- but with direct observations. And these direct observations were achieved with the aid of their winter solstice instruments -- such as the passageway at Newgrange.  

The monuments, some of which are quite big such as Newgrange, also showed a reverence and a sacredness for the passage of time. 

Experts now believe that megaliths stood at the very heart of ritual practice for the networks of communities scattered across western Europe later in the New Stone Age, or Neolithic period, that had begun around 10,000 B.C. Their function was both earthly and celestial: a focus for rites concerning the movement of the heavenly bodies across the skies, a memorial to the community’s ancestors, and an awe-inspiring site to cement local loyalty and solidarity. 

The incorporation of astronomical alignments suggests that neolithic ceremonies were closely bound with the changing seasons. These cycles were critical to agrarian communities, whose leaders would benefit from this essential knowledge.

Michael J. Gantley, Europe’s Mighty Megaliths "Rock" the Winter Solstice, National Geographic

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2017/11-12/history-europe-megaliths-solstice/

Niche at the Mnajdra South Temple, fourth millennium BCE

The southern [ED: Mnajdra] temple is oriented astronomically aligned with the rising sun during solstices and equinoxes; during the summer solstice the first rays of sunlight light up the edge of a decorated megalith between the first apses, while during the winter solstice the same effect occurs on a megalith in the opposite apse. During the equinox, the rays of the rising sun pass straight through the principal doorway to reach the innermost central niche. Quoted from Wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalithic_Temples_of_Malta

As I wrote in my previous blog:

Understanding time as a continuum in a G3 language gave humans tremendous power because now they could plan and organize for the long term. But it had a downside as well. When a G3 level of language evolved, humans became fully aware of the past and fearful of their future. Humans now understood that everything had a past and came from the past. They also understood about the future -- that it was uncertain and that events which had happened in the past, such as floods, earthquakes, diseases, crop failures, and invasions, could happen again. This understanding about the past and future (a kind of linear timeline) led to creation myths which explained where the world came from in the past and a mythology of gods and goddesses who might be influenced by human rituals to assure a satisfactory future.

T4 TIME: INDUSTRIAL, FACTORY TIME 

While this might seem like a stretch, I would date the very beginning of modern time with the adoption of the Julian calendar in Rome on January 1, 45 BCE. Although it is known now as the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use today is essentially the same as Julius Caesar's with a minor tweak by Pope Gregory in 1582.

I pick this calendar as the starting point because it is solar based and no longer takes the moon into account. Before this, in Rome, the calendar was lunar/solar which caused numerous problems, such as leap months, but also maintained an awareness of the moon's cycles as time passed. The Julian calendar ignores the moon and instead requires that people look at a chart to know what day it is. This calendar begins the disconnect between the natural cycles of the moon and stars and the way that we keep time today.

Then about 200 years later the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in Egypt perfected the ancient geocentric (Earth-centered) cosmology and created a model that accurately predicted the astronomical movements of the sun, moon, and planets. He created a system of perfect circles and then circles within circles known as epicycles. His Earth-centered cosmology was quite accurate but was 11 minutes and 14 seconds too long per year, which later had to be corrected by Pope Gregory when he revised the Julian calendar. And while Copernicus-Galileo-Kepler-Newton were eventually able to establish that the Earth went around the Sun rather than the Sun going around the Earth, the geometry of Ptolemy became a model for gearing and making machines. Clocks were constructed using gears based on Ptolemy's circles within circles. It became the blueprint for large clock towers in the 1300s and spawned a belief that the Universe was a huge well-oiled clock. Then the making of clocks led to the making of machines and the Industrial Revolution -- the revolution which still continues in today's modern world.

Clockmaking was, for long, the pinnacle of mechanical arts and the training ground as well as the inspiration for practitioners in other branches of mechanics. So highly esteemed were the craft and its products that seventeenth century pioneers of the Scientific Revolution and of the 'mechanical philosophy' conceived of a planetary system as a gigantic piece of celestial clockwork and God himself as the heavenly clockmaker.

Donald Cardwell, The Norton History of Technology 

You might think of a clock as a machine that produces the time. Yet it is still a machine. Now to take this idea one step further, we might think of an engine as basically the same as a clock, only instead of producing the time, it produces force or energy. This is because an engine relies on a clock-like series of gears and actions that must be done in sequence. 

The new industry of clockmaking was accompanied by the rise of a new and very superior class of craftsmen. These men became skilled in the design and manufacture of gears and in the different ways in which motion could be transformed and applied...Inevitably, or so it seems, the clockmakers transcended their craft and before long they are to be found designing and superintending the construction of water-wheels; later still, in the early days of the English Industrial Revolution, clock- and watchmakers figured as key engineers for the construction and operation of textile machinery. There was, in fact, a direct link between the medieval invention of the mechanical clock and the enormous industrial change that began in eighteenth-century England.

Donald Cardwell, The Norton History of Technology 

In other words, T4 or Industrial Time is man-made time. In the beginning, with the Julian calendar, people ignored the moon's cycles and referred to a chart. Nevertheless, there was a reverence for time and a feeling that time was sacred. Industrial Time then began because of the Ptolemaic model that described how the universe worked, but later disconnected from the natural world into a more abstract understanding of how gears worked which led to the development of machines and the Industrial Revolution. 

Man-made clock time is an essential part of the modern world. However, with man-made time we are increasingly removed from the natural cycles of the Earth and instead governed by the artificial clock. Today we operate on Industrial Time and we also live in an environment that is almost entirely man-made, i.e., manufactured by our industries. This industrial power, based originally on the clock, is now changing the environment of the entire planet. For example, today we move more earth with our machines than are moved by the natural forces of the Earth.

Humans May Surpass Other Natural Forces as Earth Movers

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040709083319.htm

Traffic in Atlanta, Georgia.

T5 TIME: FUTURE TIME

About forty years ago, around 1980, scientists issued clear warnings that climate change and global warming would have major consequences in the future. The Industrial Revolution and Industrial Time have created a man-made environment that is incompatible with the Earth's natural environment. Unless humans address this situation there may be serious problems ahead. Unfortunately, things that are done today may not affect the environment for decades or hundreds of years in the future making it hard to plan.

Today, for example, Miami Beach is looking as far as 70 years ahead in their development plans because of rising sea levels, instead of the usual 20 year plans most cities use.    https://www.remiamibeach.com/citywide/high-marks-for-miami-beach-s-resiliency-program/

Unfortunately, in most cases, these warnings were ignored in favor of the needs of the current economies, in favor of a modern sense of immediacy. Future generations will have to plan way ahead. They will need to plan beyond their own lifespans. This will be difficult but essential if Homo sapiens are to survive.

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CONCLUSION

My basic idea is quite simple. We human beings are animals who evolved from animals millions of years ago that lived instinctively in the moment and who had no language. Today we have language and a sophisticated sense of time. These are two very simple but basic facts.  So how did this happen? 

I do not believe it happened quickly but, as Daniel Everett has suggested, may have taken a million years or so to evolve. We had to become conscious and aware of time, then aware of the dimensions of time and processes in time, aware of our memories, and then aware of our projections or our imaginings about the future. It seems likely that this awareness of time evolved hand-in-hand with language which gave us the tools to both conceptualize time and to work with time -- in terms of sharing, planning and coordinating. I believe this probably happened in stages, not unlike those that Daniel Everett has suggested for the evolution of language.

Dan Everett has called language Humanity's Greatest Invention. I do not disagree but feel that we need to add the following: Language in conjunction with a sense of time is Humanity's Greatest Invention.

While language gave us the tools to communicate, our unique sense of time gave us the power to manage time. Civilization or, for that matter, any human society, could not achieve the power it did without an understanding of time: past, present, and future.

I think it is likely that both Daniel Everett's stages and mine will be broken down into smaller increments. So while I have suggested T2 as one stage, researchers might divide T2 into T2-A and T2-B etc.

A projection of the impact of climate change on agriculture by the 2080s.