Cro-Magnon Communication

The Twelve-Year-Old is on strike. She refuses to write more than one paragraph of a letter detailing her day to our pre-Neolithic Revolution ancestors. Why? Because she says the idea is stupid because it cannot be done--the Singularity, you see, is not in our future but in our past.

Nevertheless it is quite a good first paragraph:

I was jigging to my iPod when my friend Noelle rode up in the front passenger seat of her family's minivan. "Will your parents let you come see 'The Wedding Crashers'?" she asked.

She has a point. "Jigging" can be gotten across. And the East African Plains Ape social dynamics can be gotten across--friends, marriage, excessive parental control of the activities of adolescent females, et cetera (although not all of them: the idea of a "wedding crasher" is a very complicated concept to get across to a hunter-gatherer who has lived in a group of 40 or so her whole life).

But the rest?

Maybe I should have reversed the assignment: What kinds of science fiction would hunter-gatherers have written?

Perhaps:

"As you know, Bob," said Throg son of Throg son of Throg, "these new flint deposits allow us to make 147% more hand-axes from each flint core. That will be a great help in butchering the mastadon carcasses and preparing for the winter. If only we could build fires on a large enough scale to make the cold of the winter less deep."

"Build enough fires to warm the whole world? There will never be enough people to build enough fires to warm the world by even 1/212 of the difference between the coldness of ice and the hotness of the cloud that comes when you forget and leave the water-pot on the fire too long!"

Or:

"But we can dream dreams. Someday, in the far future, there will be not hundreds of people but hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of hundreds!"

"No."

"And they will acknowledge the leadership of one man--a man from the hot country of the Permian Basin."

"That's just not credible. There's so little water there. Anyone who voluntarily lived there would automatically disqualify himself from leadership by virtue of obvious stupidiy."

"And he will believe that changes in the kinds of plants and animals come about not because of mutation, resulting variation, and natural selection but because they are impelled to do so by the guidance of a Great Spirit!"

"Now you've gone too far--over into complete fantasy."

Comments

[RSA]

Urk approached the settlement warily. He dismounted from his mastodon and tapped a complex pattern on its flank: tap-tap. . .tap-tap. A plopping sound reached his ears. He bent down and retrieved a fresh handaxe from the ground beneath the mastodon's feet. It matched his hand perfectly.

"There must be many plus many people in this place," he thought to himself, keeping his voice low. "I'll have to be careful."

[Dubblblind]

Brad, if I've got my info right by the time The-Twelve-Year-Old was a twelve year old back then you would have most likely been already out of the picture, as in dead and scavenged. That you're not and still exercising excessive parental control might be a difficult concept to get across.

[AllenM]

I suggest you let her write a tome on what she thinks that you do wrong. Read it and say thank you. Change nothing. Then go out back and bbq up some mastodon steaks. You are the caveman enemy. You didn't grow up oppressed by parents who never even could concieve of an ipod at age 12.

[sampo]

surely our cave brother must mean "1/180 of the difference"...or is that just a snarky way to insult the intelligence of cavemen? or maybe part of the sci-fi is that they have a whole other way of measuring temperature...ahhhh, the many layers of meaning weave and bob...

[wkwillis]

Twelve year old girls belonged to the boss of the caveman group. The strongest man. You know, the eighteen year old high school jock equivalents who ran things back then.

[Steve]

Hehehe, that twelve year old girl is clearly thinking "outside the box" at a very young age. Let us hope its not TOO far outside the box that the box appears as a dot to her.

I predict she'll be the third or fourth female President of the United States!

[Maynard Handley]

"surely our cave brother must mean "1/180 of the difference"...or is that just a snarky way to insult the intelligence of cavemen? or maybe part of the sci-fi is that they have a whole other way of measuring temperature...ahhhh, the many layers of meaning weave and bob..."

Aah, the joys of the non-metric system strike again.
You know, there is good reasons why the rest of the world thinks Americans are idiots, and clinging to imperial units does not help the American's case.

[scribo]

There is no past. There is only memory of the past. Thus, a letter to the past would be returned Undeliverable. Sorry.

[dilbert dogbert]

In reguards to your last paragraph: I think faith based science has a nice ring to it.
Good luck with the 12 year old. A very interesting time for family dynamics. In about 10 years you may see some hope.

[Jess Olson]

As a 28 year old ex-Marine I have to say The Wedding Crashers is not appropriate for 12 year-olds.

[Grumpy]

I once had a "write a sci-fi story" assignment in a biology class. The premise was: in a world without saprophytes, how would dead matter be recycled? With a little bit of thought, I concluded that such a biosphere could not long endure, so I described the landscape of a dead planet.

Everyone else wrote stories about Tom Swiftian endeavors to build giant dead-matter-recycling machines. For not doing the same, I got a failing grade.

But it was pointless busywork anyway, so big deal.

[bncthor]

Jess..."As a 28 year old ex-Marine..."

Excuse me, but there are no ex-Marines. Only former Marines.

Semper Fidelis

[robotslave]

I trust Brad can explain away that 1/212-- it appears Throg III must have been referring to something more obscure than a modern unit of measure when he spoke.

I am still puzzled, though, by the origins of the Great Leader-- the most obvious candidate for that title, after all, is not from the hot country of the Permian Basin, but from a place near or beneath the eastern end of The Great Ice.

[Ralph]

Brad, darned funny. So was the first comment. But "Throg son of Throg son of Throg..." Tee hee.