Scientists have found a 60 000-year-old neck bone that suggests Neanderthals were anatomically able to produce the speech sounds modern humans make … That implies that voice-production machinery has changed little over the past 60 000 years. – News report
“You have reached the cave of Ak Ar. I’m away right now, but if you leave your name and number after the thud, I’ll get back to you if I survive this trip. Thud.”
“These damn answering machines!”
Mr Ug, managing caveman at DinoMammoth Fabrics Inc, was furious.
He was a busy man, and had no patience with these newfangled devices. Ever since private ownership of automatic weapons such as clubs and pointy stones had been banned, he’d had to pursue negotiations by so-called civilised means, like telephones, answering machines and waterhole blockades.
Lifting the flap to the intercave — the hole between the main chamber and the reception cave — he called in his personal assistant, Miss Oorg.
She, a comely young thing whose hands not so much scraped as stroked along the ground, shuffled in.
“Grunt, urgh?” she asked.
“What do you mean, ‘grunt urgh’? Do you think the ancient god of neck bones gave you the most sophisticated larynx yet designed so that you could come in here and grunt like a Pithecanthropus?”
“Sorry, Mr Ug. I keep forgetting myself. It’s my swamp background. We had to all our communicating through a bog.”
“A bog? How does that work?”
“You hang out in a bog and you say what you like, how you like and when you like. Then everyone throws mud at each other. It’s great fun. It’s going to replace talking one day.”
“Not if they don’t change its name. Bog? Sounds too much like a bug. They should make it sound less primitive. Blog, maybe?”
“Grunt urgh blog aak Ug! I mean, blog sounds like a great idea, Mr Ug!”
Mr Ug beamed.
“I always thought of myself as a caveman of vision. And I’m telling you, these answering machines are not going to last. One of these days there will be so many mechanisms for self-expression, we can let the machines and the bogs, er, blogs do all the communicating, and we can go back to grunting again.”
“Ooh, Mr Ug. I can’t wait.”
“But I would forget about the bogs, er, blogs. They’ll never catch on. I mean, if everyone can do it, why would anyone want to? Meanwhile, that stupid Ak Ar has just installed a voice-activated answering machine. I bet that’s just to avoid calls from angry hunters.”
“What’s he done this time? Harassing your reptile-keepers again?”
“Worse. He’s slaughtering woolly mammoths as if there’s no tomorrow. If he cleans out this region, I see only a dim future for the woolly leather trade. I’m not saying that Ak Ar is a species destroyer, I’m just saying …”
“Aargh. I mean, oooh. What can we do about it?” asked Miss Oorg, wide-eyed.
“Well, he’s obviously out hunting right now. That means he’s left his business in his family’s care. If you get my drift?”
“You mean … women and offspring?”
“Yeah, the unarmed of the species. If we move fast, we could make a killing.”
“But you don’t have weapons, Mr Ug …”
“No legal weapons, Miss Oorg.”
“Have you stockpiled clubs?” Miss Oorg was transfixed.
“No, no, no! Nothing so crude! We live in the most technologically advanced era in the history of caveman. No, we’ll do something far worse than physical attack.”
“What could be worse than physical attack?” Her mouth hung open. Without even a hint of a drool.
“We have to strike at their moral and physical heart. We have to destroy their morale!”
“Groargh! I mean, Gosh! What a brilliant idea! You’re so … evolved, Mr Ug!”
Without realising it, Ug had triggered Miss Oorg’s thalamic response reaction, a primitive hormonal reaction to thoughts of accumulating wealth and status through the efforts of others.
He discovered with a shock her hand was on his knee. This, in turn, triggered a hypothalamic response in Ug’s brain, stimulating a storm of neuroendocrine outputs.
He was babbling.
“Yeah! We’ll remove their reason for living! We’ll take away their family iRocks! We’ll cancel their larynx upgrades so they can’t communicate complex thoughts! We’ll pull out the earthing wires on their homecave theatres so lightning will destroy the systems and their friends will abandon them!”
“Mr Ug! No!”
Her hand was tugging at his loincloth. His limbic system was sending furious signals to his vocal chords to maintain the flow of words.
“I’ll be a pioneer! People will pay me to get their communications working again. Soon, everyone will do business like this. If you’ve got competition, you don’t attack them directly, you do it through their friends and family. Their, their, their …”
He struggled to find the words, but Miss Oorg’s hypothalamus was also working overtime: “You mean, like, their social network?”
“That’s it! We’ll attack them through their social network, and they won’t be able to do a thing, because they won’t be able to tell anyone!”
“Oh, Mr Ug,” she whispered, a moment before a surge of protein entered her forebrain. She pulled back.
Her eyes narrowed: “But what about the bogs, er, blogs? Everyone will go to the bogs, er, blogs!”
“Don’t worry about the blogs, Miss Oorg. They’ll never catch on.”
Miss Oorg looked at him as if he were one of those toothless, senile old cavemen in their 30s.
And with that, the chemistry was gone. Mr Ug suddenly realised he’d lost that wonderfully focused attention that had inspired him just moments before. He gazed wistfully after Miss Oorg as she shuffled out.
“The youth of today,” he muttered. “They always think they have a better way …”
But somewhere in the back of his slowly awakening neurocortex, the powerful executive realised that a mysterious emerging market was lost to him forever. A new age was dawning …
* Based on a true story. To read more about events based on true stories, visit my urban legends bog, er, blog.
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