Читать книгу Babel's Dawn - Edmund Blair Bolles - Страница 5

A CONFESSION

WHEN IT COMES to natural history, I prefer museums to books. It’s not that I don’t love books, but getting from the printed facts of natural history to their breathing truth can often be a bit of a slog, especially when compared with the way a museum sets the visitor down in front of fossils displayed in active positions or dioramas—stages with painted backdrops and three-dimensional figures—depicting lost worlds. Looking at those exhibits, the meaning of the facts pops out at you. So when I began work on my own volume about the natural history of speech origins, the idea of museum displays nestled easily into my head.

Babel’s Dawn is organized to help readers pretend they are strolling through a series of museum galleries filled with dioramas that display scenes from the origins of speech. It begins with the last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees (from about six million years ago) and proceeds on down to the first storytellers (a bit more than a hundred and fifty thousand years ago). Naturally, I have imagined a modern museum, and when visitors arrive in the entrance hall they are handed devices called audio guides, complete with headphones. Besides pretending that you are looking at scenes in dioramas, pretend that you are listening to an audio guide that provides the facts and ideas connecting the displays. It is that simple.

So let’s tour my natural history museum’s exhibition on the origins of speech . . .