This Is a Rock cover art

This Is a Rock

How We Learned to Talk

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This Is a Rock

By: James Johnson
Narrated by: Christopher S Ransom
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About this listen

Before grammar, stories, or history, there was pointing. Grunting. Guesswork. And somehow, from that, we built language. This isn’t a textbook. It’s the story of how humans learned to name the world, how we stitched together meaning from noise, and how the system we invented ended up running us. From cave mouths to cuneiform, slang to syntax, sacred scripts to AI chatbots, this book tells the full arc of the original human software: invented, forgotten, rediscovered, and now automated. This Is a Rock doesn’t teach you how to talk. It shows you how we figured out that we could.

©2025 James Johnson (P)2025 James Johnson
Anthropology History & Philosophy Linguistics Philosophy Science Social Sciences
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