In the Beginning was the Word. Consciousness Prefigured Man before the word was not human. To think, to reflect, requires a conception of figure and ground, the linguistic apprehension of objects, of difference, of transitivity. It has not come to the consciousness which separates this from that .
Information flow through the unconscious organism is episodic and driven by external stimuli.
No one can tell us how language began. That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth. When we come to an edge we have to shift our mode of thought, say from rational analysis to intuitive mediation. The paleoanthropologist posits that brain size alone set the stage for the emergence of language, that as genus Homo appeared on the scene, his enhanced cranial capacity was reason enough for language to begin. But recently we have seen a mass of evidence which indicates that even highly hydrocephalic individuals, who possess less than ten percent of a normal human's brain tissue, function completely normally in all linguistic tasks.