"If words had crystallized as they were spoken, and left deposits like shells or shards, the paleontologist would hardly have paid any attention to e… - Lewis Mumford

"If words had crystallized as they were spoken, and left deposits like shells or shards, the paleontologist would hardly have paid any attention to early man's tool-making: the brittle deposits of words, in all their formative stages, would have commanded his attention, though the sheer mass of these verbal midden heaps would have overwhelmed him, and he would have been as baffled over interpreting the living structure of meaning as linguists still are by the Etruscan remains.

As it turned out, the most impalpable and evanescent of man's creations before writing was invented, the mere breath of his mind, has turned out to be the most formative human achievement: every other subsequent advance in human culture, even tool-making, depended upon it. Language not merely opened the doors of the mind to consciousness, but partly closed the cellar door to the unconsciuos and restricted the access of the ghosts and demons of that underworld to the increasingly well-ventilated and lighted chambers of the upper stories. That this vast inner transformation could ever have been neglected, and the radical changes it effected could have been attributed to tool-making, seems now an incredible oversight.

As Leslie White has put it, "The ability to symbol, primarily in its expression in articulate speech, is the basis and substance of all human behavior. It was the means by which culture was brought into existence and the means of its perpetuation since the origin of man." That 'universe of discourse' was man's earliest model of the universe itself."