Manifesto Study of Time Department at a University

A SCIENCE MANIFESTO:
Why Is There No
University Department for
The Study of Time?
By Rick Doble

THE PURPOSE OF THIS MANIFESTO

The point of this manifesto is very simple. We evolved from animals who lived in the moment, yet today we work with time, manage time, schedule time, and coordinate time in a linear fashion. Time for us is the past, the present, and the future plus duration. Our civilizations could not exist or function without this sense of time.

Since this is so critical, why is there no department at a university that deals with the nature of time as it relates to humans and civilization?

Therefore the first question is how did we develop a totally different sense of time? My guess is that this took millions of years and happened in stages.

"It must have required enormous effort

for man to overcome his natural tendency

to live like the animals in a continual present."

Whitrow, Gerald James. Time in History:

Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day.

Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press. 1988, page 22.

Why is this important? We could not have created civilizations and technologies without understanding linear time. We have become the dominant species on the planet because we can manage time, plan with time, build with time, and coordinate with time. Time is crucial to our power.

If we are to understand how we developed and came to be who we are, we must study and investigate many different aspects of time.

Then the next question is how should we deal with the future because our understanding of time will be a major factor?

This is not an academic exercise. An understanding of time and how things will occur in the future will be crucial in our efforts to deal with climate change and global warming. To put it bluntly, our survival may depend on it.

A Department for 'The Study of Time' or 'Time-Studoes' at a university could delve into these subjects and shed light on these important questions.

WHY IS THE STUDY OF TIME IMPORTANT?

Nothing in life exists or has existed or will exist that is independent of time. (We'll leave the black hole questions to physicists but anyway, we are talking about life.) We live our lives according to the passage of time. 

Our civilizations could not function without our synchronized clocks, time zones, and time stamps. The world we live in could not operate without a shared understanding of time.

"Is 'time' the most commonly used noun in the English language?

"...an Oxford dictionary...announc[ed] that the word is the most often used noun in the English language." 

Study: 'Time' Is Most Often Used Noun - CBS News. Jun 22, 2006.

When you die, the date you were born and the date you died will be on your gravestone. 

Time is fundamental and vital to each of us individually, to our families, to our communities, our nations, and our planet. 

WHAT HAS PREVENTED
THE STUDY OF TIME?

The answer is simple: Most people believe that time is, well, just time and there is very little that can be said about it or done about it. Furthermore, they don't believe that cultures shape and mold our understanding of time. Time is so much a part of what we do every day, every year, every lifetime, that it is like asking a fish to describe water.

"A deep-sea fish has probably no means of apprehending the existence of water; it is too uniformly immersed in it..."

Lodge, Sir Oliver. Ether and Reality: A Series of Discourses on the Many Functions of the Ether of Space, (1925), 28.

 

I believe the complexity of time is, in a sense, hiding in plain sight. Time is here all around us and always a part of us, but thinking about it is difficult.

EXAMPLES OF HIDDEN TIME

I searched the Internet for articles about what is unique about human beings, i.e., what separates us from animals. It is clear that our ability to conceive and work with linear time is one of our unique characteristics. We are the only animal that has a sophisticated concept of linear time and as a result, we can design and build and cooperate.

However, I read numerous articles from prestigious universities about what is uniquely human, and not one mentioned our concept of time. Here is an example.

The following statement from Harvard University involves time and does not make sense without an understanding of time, but time itself is never mentioned. Time is embedded but not obvious.

"The unique brain mechanisms underlying human language also enhance human cognitive ability, allowing us to derive abstract concepts and to plan complex activities."
Uniquely Human - Harvard University Press. Jacket description of the book.  Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior. Harvard University Press. 1993.

Planning requires an understanding of time. And planning complex activities requires an advanced and sophisticated understanding of time.

Here is another example from Oxford University.

"We tend to think that being able to plan into the future, be flexible in our approach and learn from others are things that are particularly impressive about humans," says senior researcher Professor Matthew Rushworth of Oxford University's Department of Experimental Psychology.
---------------------------
"Brain area unique to humans linked to cognitive powers." Published: 28 Jan 2014.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-28-brain-area-unique-humans-linked-cognitive-powers

While this article mentions planning into the future, it does not deal with how time, itself, is understood. Yet planning and many other activities are based on an understanding of time which is fundamental.

TIME IS A FACT OF LIFE

BUT CULTURES SHAPE

OUR UNDERSTANDING

It is important to say from the outset that time is an objective fact of life.

"Time and tide wait for no man."

Geoffrey Chaucer (born 1343 - died 1400),

Prologue to The Clerk's Tale, Canterbury Tales. 1395.

But the way we conceive of time and coordinate time is very human. Time is not only an objective reality but also a human concept. How we understand time today and how we may have understood it in the past are probably quite different. I believe that the ways it was understood by hunter-gatherers in the 3 Paleolithic eras and people in the Neolithic era, in the Ancient, Classical, and Medieval eras were all very different.

I think a culture shapes and indoctrinates a shared concept of time. For example, a contemporary hunter-gatherer tribe, the Piraha tribe in the Amazon, thinks of time in immediate terms. Dr. Daniel Everett, the acknowledged expert on this culture, calls it the Immediacy of Experience Principle. Their window of time conception is about two days in the past and two days in the future. Beyond those points, they don't imagine, plan, or conceptualize. But don't think of them as being primitive. They have a complex language that identifies time and reality, such as who saw something and when did they see it. There are over 65,000 possible ways to express such things in this language.

This is just one example of how a culture can shape an understanding of time. There are others. For example, some cultures today see the past as ahead of us instead of behind us.

Now, you might disagree that cultures can shape our understanding of time. But this is a perfect example of why there needs to be a Department of Time-Studies. This hypothesis needs to be explored and researched and this should be done by knowledgeable academic professionals.

10 AREAS THAT NEED TO BE RESEARCHED

AT A UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT FOR

'THE STUDY OF TIME'

Time, like any subject, has a history, a history of time concepts by humans, a history of time-keeping methods and devices, a history of time coordination, and also a history of how time has been thought of. Plus there are many other areas that need to be studied such as how the brain processes time considerations. 

These different areas need to be studied from a time point of view. This means that researchers, scientists, and scholars must walk a fine line. They need to look at subjects from a time POV but not be biased and 'read in' facts and results that are not warranted.

#1. THE BRAIN:

Our human brain is unique both in size and its cognitive abilities. I maintain that both our perception of time, our memories, and our ability to manage time are only possible because of the way our brains are put together. With cutting-edge brain research that is now possible all of these areas need to be explored. 

For example, how does the brain handle a simple sentence like this "When I complete this job that I am working on, I will be done for the day." It sounds simple but it involves imagining a future in which the present and the associated future activity, i.e., the job, is past.

#2. CONSCIOUSNESS:

I think it is clear that an understanding of time is a major part of consciousness. But furthermore (and this is just a guess) an understanding of time is/was integral to the development of consciousness. I believe that our sense of time developed in tandem with the development of consciousness. In my study of time during the last eleven years, this was one idea that jumped out at me. 

I found one example that pointed in this direction. When blind/deaf Helen Keller suddenly understood words for the first time, she went from an unconscious state to a conscious state and also became aware of time.

#3. PROCESSES AND TECHNOLOGIES:

A sense of time and an understanding of time may have taken several million years to develop. During this time the size of the brain grew larger as memory and imagination abilities increased along with manual and cognitive skills. At the same time, basic technologies emerged and evolved such as stone tools. 

My research led me to believe that basket-making or woven-fiber technology was also one of the early technologies. Creating woven-fiber tools (a basket is a tool!) became increasingly complex which required greater cognitive skills. Making a basket (just one example of a woven-fiber tool) required imagining the basket, finding the materials for the design, processing those materials, and then making the basket. The design of a basket needed to be such that it worked for the purpose for which it was designed, Step by step processes were early examples of the use and understanding of linear time since a process is linear. 

 

"Man must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before he made any explicit distinction between past, present, and future."

Whitrow, Gerald. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press. 1988, pages 21-22.

The key to working with processes was to understand and plan the necessary steps in linear terms. This was, I believe, the beginning of thinking about time with a past, present, future, and duration. This does not mean that all time had to be thought of this way, but processes and planning needed to be thought of like this.

Processes invariably became more advanced as additional steps were added which required more complex cognitive skills and a more nuanced understanding of time. Archaeologists have found millions of stone tools from the earliest ones in the Paleolithic era to the most recent in the Neolithic era. Each stage indicated a more advanced and complex process to make the tools. 

#4. LANGUAGE:

Words are the main tools we humans use to imagine and manage time. Most languages have a full set of verb tenses although some do not. Yet all can covey a full and complex picture of time.

When language emerged and developed, it added another set of tools to the ability to communicate and teach about time plus it added tools for planning, managing, and working with time.

"For words are to thought what tools are to work; 

the product depends largely on the growth of the tools."

Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization: Vol. 1, p. 71, 1935.

"Time reference is a universal property of language..."

Lecarme, Jacqueline, Ph.D. Linguistics. "Nominal Tense and Tense Theory." Academia.edu, 1998.  https://www.academia.edu/2486019/Nominal_Tense_and_Tense_Theory

 

As I quoted earlier:

"The unique brain mechanisms underlying human language also enhance human cognitive ability, allowing us to derive abstract concepts and to plan complex activities."

Uniquely Human - Harvard University Press . Jacket description of the book.

Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior. Harvard University Press. 1993.

A study of languages with the POV of how time is conceptualized, worked with, and shared along with how children learn language and time concepts (next) might yield important insights. This is a key area for research.

#5. CULTURE:

While time is real and relentless in its march forward, our cultures shape how we understand time, communicate about time, coordinate time, plan time, etc. Our understanding of time is, in many ways, learned. 

For example, time management is one of the main skills that is taught in schools, i.e., how to meet deadlines, show up to class on time, pace yourself to complete a complex job, plan how to manage a project, etc.

#6. CHILDHOOD:

How do children acquire a sense of linear time? How much is cultural? For example, most children speak in the present tense until they are about 8-10 years old. What happens when they begin to use the past tense? What are they taught about time, and what do they learn and when? 

Studying the way children learn time concepts, along with the way they work with time, might shed light on our modern sense of time along with ideas about how prehistoric cultures might have developed and used their sense of time.

"Unfortunately, we are not very well informed in the psychology of primitive man, but there are children all around us, and it is in studying children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth."

Piaget, Jean. "Genetic Epistemology." Columbia Forum, (1969), 12, 4. 

$7. THE DIMENSIONS OF TIME

We can think of time as having three dimensions. Immediate time is one-dimensional and without it, nothing would exist. Cyclical time is two dimensional with repeating cycles such as sunrise and sunset, spring and autumn, birth and death. And finally, there is linear time with the past, present, and future always moving forward. 

While the modern world has adopted linear time, we still have a deep need to experience time in the moment. We can do this and become excited in the moment with live sports events and live music. These have the immediacy that we crave. We also need to experience cyclical time. And we do this every year, for example, with annual repeating points in time such as Christmas and New Year's Day or Halloween.

This could be another area of research for a time-studies curriculum at a university.

#8. TIME IN PREHISTORY AND ANCIENT TIMES:
-- Animal existence and the Lower & Middle Paleolithic:
Since we began as animals who lived in the present, how did we acquire a linear sense of time? How is the human brain different? How did our memory develop? How did planning develop? How long did this take?
Scientists have reenacted tool-making at their different stages and then measured brain activity. These experiments have given these researchers a general idea of early hominin cognitive abilities and how they developed over millions of years.
-- The Upper Paleolithic
By the Upper Paleolithic, when the human brain was fully developed and as advanced as our brains today, a conscious understanding of linear time may have evolved that was almost immediate. This was possibly a window of time that was only a day or two. This later may have developed into a sense of time that we have evidence for. The contemporary nomadic hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon has an immediate sense of time with a window of about five days: the present and two days before and two days in the future. Their way of thinking suggests that Upper Paleolithic nomadic hunter-gatherers may have functioned this way as well.
-- The Neolithic:
The change from a momentary sense of time, that probably occurred during the Paleolithic era, to a linear year-long sense of time in the Neolithic era, was as revolutionary as the change to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle that occurred in the Neolithic. What can we understand from the Neolithic evidence that has been left? There are, for example, many structures that were built to determine the time of the winter solstice such as Newgrange in Ireland and more than a hundred 'circular enclosures' in Germany and Central Europe. It appears that knowing a precise point in time during the year's cycle was important.
In the Neolithic era when yearly planting was essential, long-term linear time probably developed, i.e., it was time based on the seasons but probably within a cosmic view that was cyclical, since the seasons repeated every year.
-- Ancient and Classical Civilizations:
To govern a large civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt, there had to be a way to gauge time, to track time, to standardize time, to schedule and coordinate time, to plan, and to keep a record of time. How did this start, develop, and work after thousands of years? Researchers can study many records that are available for this time period.
-- Medieval Clocks and the Industrial Age:
While not often appreciated, many large complex clocks were built in the Middle Ages using the gearing geometry of Ptolemy who had created the most accurate Geocentric (earth-centered) astronomy. While his astronomy was superseded by Heliocentric (sun-centered) Copernican astronomy, his gearing worked extremely well and was used to build these clocks. These clocks became the basis for industrial machinery and so led directly to the Industrial Revolution.

"The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age."
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, Ch. 1, sct. 2.

#9. THE MODERN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME:

Our modern sense of time is, in a sense, the reverse of the Neolithic cosmic view of time that was primarily cyclical. Now cyclical time (New Year's Day, Halloween) exists within linear time, i.e., year 2023, year 2024, year 2025. Round cyclical clocks that emphasize the repeating nature of time are being replaced by linear digital clocks whose numbers only go forward.

In the mechanized consumer world of today, time is a commodity. Time is sliced into exact sections of seconds, minutes and hours. We think of time as a resource. We can save time, spend time, or waste time, for example. Time is money, as the saying goes.

Time today is a product of the Industrial Revolution and is machine-based. At the heart of all computers is a clock. Our lives are run by the clock: from the alarm ringing in the morning to that extra drink Friday night because the workweek has finally ended. The time we live with now is mechanical.

How can we learn to be comfortable with time instead of feeling trapped by time? Today there are many different time styles.

#10. TIME, THE FUTURE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT: 

To survive as a species, we need to develop a new understanding of time. While we have enjoyed the immediate benefits of our advanced technology, we have ignored the long-term consequences. Furthermore, this new way of thinking needs to be a shared global effort. 

Our first job in developing this new understanding is to study how the environment will change based on what we have done so far. If our assessment is accurate, it would allow planning for things such as sea level rise or the possible change in worldwide ocean currents that could radically alter the climate in some countries. Understanding how quickly or slowly changes will occur will be critical. 

Next, we need to design technologies that have no impact on the environment. We need to take the time to design, plan, and manufacture so that the consequences, by-products, and side effects do not affect the environment. And this needs to be done on a global scale.

Finally, we need to build for the future even though we may not see the benefits in our lifetime. Called cathedral thinking, we may need to design and start building for the long term future. We need to do this so that we can reverse some of the damage we have done and prevent further damage to the environment.

For these ideas to be persuasive, research needs to determine the best ways to communicate this need, how to convince people of its importance, and then how to get people and industries to adopt a long-term point of view.

_____________________________________________

For In-Depth Articles
About These Topics 

Go To
The DeconstructingTime Blog

The DeconstructingTime Blog Web Address

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/

Most articles are available as PDF files you can view or download.

You can download PDF's at:

https://unc.academia.edu/RickDoble/Drafts

The following is a sample 

of the over 125 in-depth articles 

about the Human Understanding of Time (HUT)

Key Ideas About the Evolution of the Human Understanding of Time (HUT)

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-big-picture-about-time-humanity.html

Should "The Stone Age" Be Called "The Stone and Basket Age?"

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2023/05/rename-stone-age-as-stone-and-basket-age.html

Time & Consciousness and Helen Keller

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/12/time-consciousness.html

Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time

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

How the Discredited Geocentric Cosmos Was a Critical Component of the Scientific Revolution

OR 

How Ptolemy's Geocentric Astronomy Helped Build the Modern World

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-discredited-geocentric-cosmos-was.html

How Language Began And the Human Understanding of Time:

Daniel Everett's New Theories About the Evolution of Language 

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

The Neolithic Cognitive Leap:

More Than a Revolution the New Stone Age

Involved a New Understanding of Time

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2022/05/neolithic-concepts-of-time.html

Evidence for a Basket Weaving

and Woven-Fiber Technology

in the Paleolithic Era

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2019/09/evidence-for-basket-weaving-technology.html

The Importance of Processes in the Paleolithic Era

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-importance-of-processes-in.html

Rick Doble's Theory About 

The Human Understanding of Time (HUT)

AN OVERVIEW

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2022/10/hut-theory-human-understanding-of-time.html

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.