Abstract
Perhaps you remember Steven Spielberg’s movie released in 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The memorable end of this movie shows how humans might communicate with extraterrestrials through the interchange of music, with the famous melody “D E C C G” that we all hummed.
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Being true to this theory, from fossil remains the most we could deduce is that Neanderthals sang, not that they talked. Although the complexity of their technology seems to imply the spoken interchange of abstract information, we should not dismiss the possibility of cultural transmission by means of imitation.
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On the other hand, in tests done by this author, presenting the same images but using changed versions of the names (bibi and kooka), most people chose bibi for the orange star and kooka for the violet cloud. Maybe the choice had as much to do with the vowels that are used as with the consonants. On the other hand, the results of Köhler’s experiment are not reproduced in individuals with autism. The percentage of assignation in this case is close to 50%, that is, as assigning names randomly.
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© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Ballesteros, F.J. (2010). Searching for a Common Language. In: E.T. Talk. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6089-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6089-4_10
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