2 Reasons to Wish for Time Travel

Last weekend we took my little grandson to the Field Museum of Natural History.  He wanted to see really big dinosaurs, so we walked past fossils of dinosaur heads and fossils of small and medium dinosaurs, until we found the room with enormous dinosaur fossils: brachyiosaurus, tyrannosaurus, triceratops, etc.

         Then, even though he’s only 2 ½, my grandson still had plenty of energy to visit the mastodon and woolly mammoth show.  There, in addition to the fossils, we saw dioramas of the tundra and forests these animals inhabited.  And we watched movies that were so realistic, a documentary film maker might have spent months living among the woolly mammoths to shoot the footage.  (I really don’t know how these films were made, but I hazard the guess it was done the way “Avatar” was, with a computer building on special elephant film.)

         During this Field Museum visit, the question came up, “If time travel were possible, and your safety could be guaranteed, would you go back to the time of the dinosaurs or of the woolly mammoths?”  My answer was absolutely YES!  I’m dying to be there, especially to see, hear, smell the dinosaurs and their swampy, warm earth.

         Then I found the May 21 issue of Science I thought I’d lost, and read an article about the origin of language (“Animal Communication Helps Reveal Roots of Language”).  Suddenly, I was wishing again that time travel were possible. Over the years, I have read any number of hypotheses about how language came about: for cooperative hunting, as a result of the long dependency of human infants, gestures-first-vocalizations-second, by copying parental grunts and croaks, by the same imitative means birds use to learn song....

         But what I wouldn’t give to go back to the pre-beginnings, beginnings, late beginnings, early development, development, etc.  It would be so satisfying to know at last the answer to this puzzle of the origins of human speech.  If only time travel really were possible!

         Alas, with respect to dinosaurs, mammoths, and prehistoric human speech, we will never know for sure what it was like in those early times.  But the hypotheses intrigue me, and I am always up for reading about—and imagining—yet another scenario.