Milestones in the History of Human Communication

From body and spoken language to writing

The first forms of human communication were nonverbal, based on body language, such as pointing and miming.

The first great evolutionary leap was the development of articulate oral language, which is estimated to have emerged between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

For millennia, oral tradition was the only method of transmitting knowledge, stories and culture from one generation to the next.

The next transformative milestone was the invention of writing, around 3,500 BC in civilizations such as Sumer and Egypt.

It began with signs representing real objects, such as hieroglyphs, and its main function was to record and preserve information beyond the limits of human memory.

However, its appearance also had a profound social impact, since access to reading and writing remained in the hands of an elite, further marking class differences.

The printing press and the birth of journalism

After writing, the next great milestone in the history of communication was the invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg in the 15th century.

This technology revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge by enabling the mass production of books at a speed and cost drastically lower than manual copying by monks.

The ability to reproduce identical texts in large quantities broke the monopoly that the Church and the elites had over information.

The social repercussions were immense: the printing press accelerated the advance of knowledge, spurred new political and religious movements and, crucially, gave rise to journalism.

With the printing press, the newspaper was born, considered the first mass media in history, capable of bringing current information to a wide and geographically dispersed audience.

Summary

The first forms of communication were non-verbal, fol