Putting history in a pre-historical context has a number of advantages. It provides

• a happy beginning. My story may not have a happy ending - but it has a happy beginning. We are all born very wise. Better than demeaning beginning in which it is assumed that we are a blank slate on which culture writes. This "tabula" is far from "rasa".
• a story line. Whereas history has no generally accepted theory - pre-history does. That theory is, of course, the theory of evolution. This theory can be extended by adding cultural evolution to biological evolution. Thus, we have a line on which to hang the story of media.
• a firm foundation. Places media studies within a firm framework of psychology and of biology. Steven Pinker (a local lad who graduated from McGill and then went to MIT to study with Noam Chomsky) recently published a book with the title How The Mind Works [PINKER]. Such a title may be premature and presumptuous but it is no longer preposterous. Evolutionary psychologists, like Pinker, are transforming many mysteries of mind into mere problems. As a child, I was addicted to jig-saw puzzles. I would start with the outer edge and work inward frame by frame. According to Pinker, the outer border of the jig-saw puzzle of mind is the principle of natural selection and the next border is the concept of the nervous system as a tool for processing information to enable us to survive. This book could be considered as my attempt to fill in the third border [see Figure 4].
• a long perspective. Going back into the past enables us to better understand where we are at in the present and where we are going in the future. How far back? Who made the Big Bang? Who heard it? Not that far back since the answers to both questions would not involve any creature we could identify with. However, we should go back to the quaternary period of the Pleistone Era. We appeared on the stage during the fourth act. Homo Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens were fighting to be our ancestors. Homo Sapiens won because they had better vocal apparatus. Thus, communication was an issue right from the beginning.