“I do not know that any sound I may hear is a word until I know what it means”
From the earliest stirrings of human consciousness, humankind has engaged in tribal and societal participation. Whether or not such participation aligned perfectly with contemporary standards of science, astronomy, or botany is not my primary concern. What matters is the indisputable fact that these peoples elicited genuine meaning from their participatory engagement with the world. The vehicle through which this meaning was realized is what Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances-A Study in Idolatry aptly termed “collective representation” — a shared phenomenon created by and through our thinking as a tribe, colony, city, etc. —constituting the very world we accept as shared as real.
Barfield further identified the active mental process underlying collective representation as figuration. Figuration is the imaginative act by which the percipient and participant mind combines and construes raw sensations into a coherent phenomenal world of beings, objects, and events. Etymologically, “figuration” derives from Latin figura, “form, shape, or image,” from fingere, “to form, fashion, or mold.” In this sense, figuration functions as the “stage and setting” of the collective representational matrix within which human consciousness operates. Thus, I delineate a fivefold structure of meaning-making: (1) participation, the foundational engagement; (2) collective representation, the entire scope of shared signals and signs that constitute perceived reality; (3) figuration, the imaginative activity that fashions the stage and setting of collective representation; (4) drama (Greek: drao: “to make, to act, action, deed, perform”), the active performance or enactment within that representational field; and (5) meaning, from the Proto-Indo-European root *men-/meino-, “to think, to be mindful,” yielding concepts of opinion, intention, and mental construction. We arrive at meaning, therefore, by making decisions within our given stage and setting.
This framework finds anthropological and linguistic resonance in ancient shamanic traditions.
In my book and on my website, I present the following argument concerning the origins of linguistics as part of a deeper natural order.
At the very bottom, I begin with phonetics—the raw physical sounds humans and our ancestors produced with their mouths, tongues, and lungs. These sounds become organized into phonemes, the smallest units that change meaning, such as the distinction between /p/ in “pat” and /b/ in “bat.” From there, I move into semiotics, the study of signs and how they generate meaning. Following Ferdinand de Saussure, a sign consists of two parts: the signifier (the sound or form, e.g., the phonetic sequence /dɒɡ/) and the signified (the mental concept it evokes, such as the animal itself). The link between them is largely arbitrary, established through social convention rather than natural resemblance.
This structured progression—from raw physicality to organized units to meaningful systems—mirrors the ordered emergence we observe in physics, cosmology, and biological complexity. Language does not arise in isolation but as part of the same default drive toward structure, differentiation, and shared meaning that governs natural systems. No matter how far you go back or how late you arrive into the living languages, the same rules have always applied. Take for example which extends deep into the Neanderthal era. A compelling instantiation appears in the recent discovery of the Chagyrskaya 64 molar, a lower molar from an adult Neanderthal individual recovered from Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains of southwestern Siberia. Dated to approximately 59,000 years ago (within the Middle Paleolithic, during a period of Neanderthal occupation between roughly 49,000 and 70,000 years ago), this tooth exhibits clear evidence of intentional invasive dental intervention. Researchers identified a deep, irregular hole extending into the pulp chamber, with microscopic scratches and grooves consistent with repeated drilling using a fine stone tool (likely a jasper point or similar microlithic implement). This procedure, resembling a primitive root canal, was performed to remove infected pulp and alleviate pain, followed by continued use of the tooth (evidenced by antemortem wear).
This act demonstrates advanced planning, tool innovation, clinical awareness, and social care—behaviors requiring abstraction, foresight, and the transmission of technical knowledge–all presupposing symbolic cognition. Such symbolic cognitive capabilities were necessary to coordinate complex tool-making (as seen in the rich lithic assemblage at the site), plan hunts, care for the sick, and maintain group cohesion across generations, etc . Therefore, it was necessary for Neanderthals to engage with symbols and signs. In Peircean (Charles Sanders Peirce) terms, they moved beyond mere indexes (direct cause-effect signals) toward true symbols grounded in shared convention. This aligns with broader evidence of Neanderthal symbolic behavior, including standardized tools, possible ornamentation, and burial practices that reflect a capacity for arbitrary signification.
In my view, the Chagyrskaya 64 individual’s dental treatment (ca. 59,000 years ago!) exemplifies the same idea of natural chaos to defaulted – conventional logos (-ology) of order: Raw materials such as stone tools and tooth picks using natural materials are structured through deliberate actions into meaningful intervention, paralleling how phonetics becomes phonology and signals become language. This reflects a unified natural system, i.e., —from cosmological emergence to linguistic structure—operating by default in the human (and Neanderthal) mind unto Logic, Logos, -ology. This framework positions the Chagyrskaya discovery not as an anomaly but as further evidence of the deep, ordered continuity between mind, symbol, and nature.
Bibliography
1. Zubova, A. V., et al. “Evidence of Invasive Dental Treatment in a Neanderthal from Chagyrskaya Cave, Siberia.” PLOS One, 2026. https://doi.org/[relevant DOI].
2. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966 [1916].
3. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958.
4. Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton, 1957.
5. Botha, Rudolf. Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
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7. Kolobova, Ksenia, et al. [Relevant co-authors on Chagyrskaya tools and context]. Works on Altai Neanderthals, various publications.
8. Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings. The Hague: Mouton, 1962–1985.
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Glossary
1. Phonetics: The study of the physical production and perception of speech sounds.
2. Phoneme: The smallest contrastive unit of sound in a language that can change meaning.
3. Semiotics/Semiology: The study of signs and sign processes; coined prominently by Saussure as “semiology.”
4. Signifier: The form of the sign (sound, image, or word).
5. Signified: The mental concept or object evoked by the signifier.
6. Arbitrariness (of the sign): The conventional, non-natural link between signifier and signified (Saussure).
7. Symbol (Peircean): A sign based on learned convention rather than resemblance or direct connection.
8. Icon: A sign that resembles its object (Peirce).
9. Index: A sign connected by causal or contiguous relation to its object.
10. Langue: The abstract system of language rules and conventions (Saussure).
11. Parole: Actual instances of language use in speech.
12. Recursion: The embedding of structures within structures; central to Chomsky’s view of syntax.
13. Symbolic Cognition: The ability to use arbitrary signs for abstract thought and communication.
14. Middle Paleolithic: The cultural period associated with Neanderthals (~300,000–40,000 years ago).
15. Semiotic Triangle: The relation between symbol, thought/concept, and referent (Ogden & Richards).
