The history of communication technologies (media and appropriate inscription tools) have evolved in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange to full conversations and mass communication. The history of communication itself can be traced back since the origin of speech circa 100,000 BCE. The use of technology in communication may be considered since the first use of symbols about 30,000 years BCE. Among the symbols used, there are cave paintings, petroglyphs, pictograms and ideograms. Writing was a major innovation, as well as printing technology and, more recently, telecommunications and the Internet.
Primitive times Human communication was initiated with the origin of speech approximately 100,000 BCE. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago. The imperfection of speech allowed easier dissemination of ideas and eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communication, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol. The oldest known symbols created for communication were cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic age. The oldest known cave painting is located within Chauvet Cave, dated to around 30,000 BCE. These paintings contained increasing amounts of information: people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago. The connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics: in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were the same (Egyptian: 's-sh', Greek: 'graphein').
Storytelling Verbal communication is one of the earliest forms of human communication, the oral tradition of storytelling has dated back to various times in history. The development of communication in its oral form can be based on certain historical periods. Oral history is the method of collecting and preserving primary source testimonies from individuals and groups who lived through those time periods. The complexity of oral communication has always been reflective based on the circumstance of the time period. Verbal communication was never bound to one specific area, instead, it had and continues to be a globally shared tradition of communication. People communicated through song, poems, and chants, as some examples. People would gather in groups and pass down stories, myths, and history. Oral poets from Indo-European regions were known as "weavers of words" for their mastery over the spoken word and ability to tell stories. Nomadic people also had oral traditions that they used to tell stories of the history of their people to pass them on to the next generation. Nomadic tribes have been the torch bearers of oral storytelling. Nomads of Arabia are one example of the many nomadic tribes that have continued through history to use oral storytelling as a tool to tell their histories and the story of their people. Due to the nature of nomadic life, these individuals were often left without architecture and possessions to call their own, and often left little to no traces of themselves. The richness of the nomadic life and culture is preserved by early Muslim scholars who collect the poems and stories that are handed down from generation to generation. Poems created by these Arabic nomads are passed down by specialists known as sha'ir. These individuals spread the stories and histories of these nomadic tribes, and often in times of war, would strengthen morale within members of given tribes through these stories. Another example of this nomadic lifestyle where the people had no possessions but only passed on stories were the Waldensians, who passed along the word of God to anyone who would listen. In its natural form, oral communication was, and has continued to be, one of the best ways for humans to spread their message, history, and traditions to the world. Now, oral history is used to collect people's life testimonies and experiences, and is used to recover the voices that were once absent from history. It is not meant to capture past events, but it's meant to reveal the origin of the memories.
Petroglyphs
The next advancement in the history of communications came with the production of petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years for Homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The petroglyphs of the Hawaiian islands were associated with several kinds of symbolism, myths, legends, and art. It is possible that Homo sapiens (humans) of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like rocks, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania.
Pictograms
A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered chronologically. Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BCE, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce and become increasingly popular around 6000–5000 BCE. Another example of this is how the people of the Netherlands used pictograms to portray what was going on at the time. They were the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BCE.
Ideograms
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