Thy speaketh into existence – Language
There are over seven thousand languages[i] spoken by humans in the in the world today. For humans, language is communicated verbally, with gestures, and in writing.
Language is an innovation in that it renders utility, well, in particular to humans (because we are the only ones who matter in this world, right? At least we think so).
We are so full of ourselves. Maybe rightfully so – we dominate the world. Or, unless a novel and more dominant species come to compete us out, or, a seismic disaster occurs. Don’t forget, a disaster made dinosaurs go extinct over 60 million[ii] years ago.
With language, a person can verbally tell a loved one that they adore them. An employer can give a written directive to an employee in an email. In the news on TV, the sign language interpreter shares the same uttered news to deaf audiences.
With speech, a person is taught to fix cars. Fixing cars is so complex that an elaborate combination of written and verbal cues is needed.
Now imagine the intricacy that goes into making an aeroplane. It needs manuals upon handbooks for the next person to rebuild it. Orated speech alone would not do justice.
It is easy to digest that a complex innovation such as an aeroplane is worked on by many people. And that those people would need to communicate, verbally, with signs and in written form.
Let’s go back 3 million years ago to the first evidence of human innovations, the stone tools (e.g. hammer stones, stone cores, and sharp stone flakes), by our ancestor the Australopithecus.
Jump to the control of fire by Homo erectus about 2 million years ago. Think of the flint blades 300 thousand years ago found in Morocco.
The stone tools shows invention of tools better than sharpened sticks. Flint stones made better sharp objects than sticks and most stones used for cutting roots, fruits and meat. Also, they could start fire.
These shows that innovation is progressive, gets complex and improves, i.e. newer innovations add agility and efficiency – (they should) or else they are less effective and will not recruit further users.
For sharp objects and fire to be carried into other generations, they needed to be communicated through use and some language. It means our ancestors had capacity to communicate innovations into the next generation.
Note that communication doesn’t mean verbal speech only, but means all manner of relating information, even gestures.
A gesture could be any movement of the body or part of the body by an animal (e.g. the hand) to signal to another animal.
A 2014 study observed that our cousins, the chimps, and their/our other cousins the bonobos (chimps and bonobos are of the genus pan), have over 60[iii] communication gestures. It is language.
Bonobo and chimp gestures overlap by about 90 percent[iv]. They use the gestures for things like sex, grooming and indication to travel.
A dictionary called The Great Ape Dictionary[v] catalogues communication gestures of chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans; and they all overlap by about 60 to 80 percent.[vi]
Another study revealed that toddlers and chimps share 46 gestures[vii].
Note that gorillas, humans, chimps and orang-utans all belong to different genus groups – but descended from the same ape family. It’s fascinating how nature brings similarities in this way.
Animals travel in herds for convenience: to prey or to fight prey.
The tribe of animals above do communicate, in some way, evidently through physical gestures.
Lions rub heads to greet. Ants use pheromones (chemical) to identify routes and their colonies. Octopuses have been observed to turn dark in colour to gesture a fight mode. [viii] [ix] [x]
All the other animals do not use words, but sound gestures.
Birds use sounds and song to communicate – to scare off predators or warn other birds of dangers. Frogs use sounds to signal mating.[xi]
Chimps and bonobos play – even with humans, and also can laugh. Play and laughter are communication.
“Ooohoo ooohoo oohoo oohoo oohoo oohoo….” it apparently means “hello” in chimpamzee language according to Dr Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a former primatogy professor at Kyto University in Japan. Check it out on YouTube.[xii]
Chimps also use vocal sounds or make noise to signal – e.g. fear, anger, or excitement. However it not necessarily words but just signalling sounds.
All this is language – gesturing as it is.
As said, it then makes sense that if animals without human cognition live in herds, they must be communicating. I.e. with gestured language – their evolved language.
However those animals do not innovate farther like humans have done and continue to do. They innovate in as so far as using their intelligence to survive – or barely making a stick spear as our dear cousins the chimps do. And not a step further.
Anyhow, back to the important and self-indulgent beings, the ones who named their genus “wise” – sapien is latin for wise.
They learned speak from where?
There are many theories that try to assess and rule when human speech came up.
The ones that should be ruled out are the theories that suggest language came just like that, like on a specific day and fully, and that it did not evolve over time.
The theories are subdivided into two categories: The “Continuity Theories” and the ”Discontinuity theories.”
The former is built on the idea that language evolved through different primate ancestors (our lineage).
The discontinuity says language must have appeared suddenly during the course of human evolution.
The American linguist, Noam Chomsky, who is a proponent of this discontinuity theory, contends that spoken language started suddenly in humans through a single chance mutation in one individual a 100 thousand years ago, in a perfect or near perfect form.[xiii]
It means it started with us homo sapiens.
To me, it sounds theological, like how a man was caused sleep so that his rib (Genesis 2:22-24) could be taken out to give to and make a woman.
It is a theory that cannot be disproven because evidence against it doesn’t or wouldn’t exist – or is not presented. It is just supposed.
It brings the questions of how did that one person infect everyone in the world then to form language, and different evolved languages? We’ve all learned languages, they take time.
The continuity theory sounds evolutionarily of natural selection, i.e. Darwinian – as Charles Darwin himself inferred – and I am swayed by it.
In his epoch book, “The Descent of Man”, he ? Charles Darwin ? simplified his assertion of the evolution of language in the following ways.[xiv]
“Through his powers of intellect, articulate language has been evolved; and on this his wonderful advancement has mainly depended.” “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures.” “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.” “The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.”
To make a comparison of the existence and evolution of communication (language) in other animals, he said this. “In Paraguay the Cebus azarae when excited utters at least six distinct sounds, which excite in other monkeys similar emotions.” “It is a more remarkable fact that the dog, since being domesticated, has learnt to bark in at least four or five distinct tones. Although barking is a new art, no doubt the wild parent-species of the dog expressed their feelings by cries of various kinds. With the domesticated dog we have the bark of eagerness, as in the chase; that of anger, as well as growling; the yelp or howl of despair, as when shut up; the baying at night; the bark of joy, as when starting on a walk with his master; and the very distinct one of demand or supplication, as when wishing for a door or window to be opened.”
In biology, the definition of natural selection is termed as, ‘the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype.’
The story of biological life, starting out as single cellular organisms over 3.8 billion years ago; some dying out; and others surviving; others evolving; others merging and forming multi cellular organisms, thus diversifying into novelty and forming new species. This was through interaction with the also changing environment.[xv]
For example, 21 percent of the air we breathe is made up of molecular oxygen, and it was largely absent for about the first 2 billion years of Earth’s history. Humans, in fact our great ape society, only became possible to evolve into when there was enough molecular oxygen.[xvi]
This is also language, it is evolved, as it seems, through the interaction of humans, their environment (one reason being to survive danger), the evolved biological attributes of being able to innovate upon layers, making diversified sounds – to worded sounds, comprehending the utility of innovating these sounds and words into recurring words, and attaching rules (grammar as we know it today) of when to put a word ahead of the other for hierarchy of sense – put somewhere there the utility of naming inventions for referencing’s sake.
A lot of research also has gone into investigating the anatomical differences – and neurology of the brain (the next chapter tackles this) – that perhaps allow human speech as compared to other animals.
All mammals produce vocalisation similarly. Air is inhaled through the nose and mouth and sounds are expelled from the lungs.
In comparison with other primates, humans have an enhanced control of breathing, which then enables inhaling to be short and exhaling to be extended – oration is enunciated through the latter.
Ann MacLarnon’s study (November 2019) explained it as, “Human sound sequences are also much more rapid than those of non-human primates, except for very simple sequences such as repetitive trills or quavers.[xvii] Human vocal tract articulation is much faster, and humans are able to produce multiple sounds on a single breath movement, inhalation or exhalation. The unique form of the tongue within the vocal tract in humans is considered to be a key factor in the speech-related flexibility of supralaryngeal vocal tract.”
The cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman opens his paper “The Evolution of Human Speech: Its Anatomical and Neural Bases” with, “Human speech involves species?specific anatomy deriving from the descent of the tongue into the pharynx.”[xviii]
He further goes, “Speech also requires a brain that can “reiterate”—freely reorder a finite set of motor gestures to form a potentially infinite number of words and sentences. The end points of the evolutionary process are clear.”
Chimps and other mammals lack this.
Human beings are the only animals with chins, and there are varied and competing hypothesis on its function. The other arguments suggest that chins also help with speech.
The point of highlighting the chin, and the other differences humans have to other animals in perhaps facilitation of speech, is, different species evolved differently and in their direction.
Meaning, humans have speech because their evolutionary adjacent possible allowed speech to be as it is today and unique to them as is. It means the adaptation to speech co-opted these other organs to enable human speech.
Adjacent Possible is a theory devised by the theoretical biologist, Stuart A. Kauffman, in his study of complex biological systems.[xix]
It infers that, evolution in biological species happened or happens as current species and the environment allow. The existence of single cellular organisms, meant multi cellular organisms were an adjacent possible, as the former merged to allow the latter.
Like a chair and a wheel allowing a wheelchair to be made.
There is no way – my inference – language began with homo sapiens. It has an evolutionary trail.
The trail exists even with chimps and gorillas, and lions.
All these other animals have language, just not spoken language like humans. Ours, like we innovate further and farther, is a farther step from gestured and tone speech.
Imagine from those stone stools our ancestors made, to all the innovations that happened till today (the aeroplane and smartphone).
You can neither build nor rebuild the two with just gestures (hence maybe the chimps are so behind with innovation – I am mocking them here).
So surely, the evolution of communication expressed in verbal language must have been also evolving or becoming through natural selection: I.e. trial and error – language operates within the allowances of our biology (I will touch on this a bit below): say vocal chords and other faculties that allow speech. Nothing new can be created with what doesn’t exist, and therefore our spoken language exploits the evolved possible in us.
My trail here – or say argument (trail is a better word in this regard) – is language evolved from basic sounding gestures to articulate words and different tribes evolved their own language andgrammar. The more the varying and improving innovations were being created, the more words were needed and thus created.
Think of grammar as evolved per specific language – there are varying languages with their own evolved or suited grammar. Think of grammar as a mathematical calculus that holds existing words and newly invented words together for clear meaning (i.e. a structure is needed for consistent meaning, and it exists in grammar).
Of course, this book is not a scientific thesis – or neither I am trying to articulate a novel finding. I will keep it basic in showing frameworks to understand money.
So, on the argument still, language evolved through natural selection and is perhaps evidenced by the innovations and travelling made by different members of the homo genus.
Homo erectus is the earliest of the genus homo and lived longer than all of them (almost 2 million years).
His travel exploits and innovations point to that his language must have been a tad articulate.
Fossil discoveries place Erectus as the earliest of genus homo in Africa about 1.9 million years ago (our homie Turkana Boy), then in Europe, and in Asia where he seemed to have survived longer around 117 years ago (he existed along with sapiens).[xx] [xxi]
Per country, fossil record placed him in South Africa[xxii], China[xxiii], Kenya, Vietnam[xxiv], Ethiopia[xxv] and Eritrea[xxvi].
Dr Daniel Everett, an American linguist and anthropologist, in a paper[xxvii] and subsequent book titled “Language: The Cultural Tool”, says language is a tool, like a spear shaped by chimps and sapiens is a tool to solve problems (acquiring food by killing efficiently).
I frame it in the following way: language is an innovation and serves utility. It is possible because of our evolved biology. And as in innovation, it mirrors our biological inclinations for whatever utility we seek consciously or unconsciously.
In a simple sense, like all other non word speaking animals communicate to maybe survive or signal mating, we evolved spoken worded language for that and more – because our freak*n biology allows it, i.e. evolved to innovate further and further.
We do not know if lions make jokes or find things funny – because they don’t make speech perhaps.
Every language has its – evolved – grammar.
Everett’s central idea in the book is that there is no universal grammar and that language evolved with trial and error.
Every language has grammar, or say its own grammar; or say its evolved grammar. Some languages steal or borrow from others; or come from others (one or more); however, at the end of the day, they have their own grammar – whether unique or not unique or borrowed. Nonetheless, it serves facilitating that language.
Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana – which are almost the same totally and with marginal and insignificant differences – come from a common ancestor of the languages[xxviii]. English takes a lot from Germanic languages from which also German and Dutch evolved[xxix]. French takes[xxx] a lot from Latin. Sesotho, Germanic languages and Latin also evolved from other languages.
Language I would say, is, an innovation facilitated by possibilities of evolved biology, and the need for humans to communicate better (all animals communicate) as allowed by our ability to innovate layers upon layers and forwardly.
Of course above I am using plain statements to elaborate the point.
The point of this section is not to argue that there is ample evidence (though there is) that language evolved with our ancestors, but to show that, well, language, has and continues to make it easier for us to communicate the exchange of innovations and to innovate further. I will show you this as you read.
Take out language and what concept do you have that could have aided our innovations – their discovery, reproduction and improvement, and their transacting, that we have today?
Another sense is a customer articulating the kind of dress they wanted designed for them – a novel dress by the result. Articulate spoken language did and does justice to such, not just gestures.
The creation of spoken articulate language was the adjacent possible of many biological and environmental innovations that followed prior it (e.g. increase of molecular oxygen – example given earlier).
A bicycle works for bipedal animals, .i.e. us humans. Chimps are both bipedal and quadrupedal. There are chimps that can ride bicycles, they were taught by humans.
In the same sense bicycles were designed for humans (bipedal) and fit them. Our languages works for our evolved vocal factors and maybe other factors which I am missing (could be culture, brain cognition, etc) – however chimps are excluded in this regard (although they can be trained to ride bicycles).
You can say we are the quadrupedal of language, to give an analogy.
Language and money in aid
We cannot separate the agility the two have created together for us, i.e. money and language.
Take human spoken language out of the money equation and seemingly you get animals that have innovations but cannot transact (communicate) effectively as with spoken language – or lesser innovations because gestures alone could not have articulated other novel and complex innovations (think of the dress example above).
Is it even possible? Spoken language contributed immensely to get us here today where we have millions (if not billions or trillions) of innovations.
The innovations that is spoken worded and written language, and the innovation that is money, well, go fucken hand in hand.
Talk the swim with boats/rafts
In 2010, on the Island of Crete in Greece, hand axes, cleavers and scrappers[xxxi], that represent Acheulean tool making (tool making techniques by homo erectus and early hominids, found in Africa and West Asia) were found.
Researchers on the project, Thomas F. Strasse and Eleni Panagapoulou, estimated that the tools could be as old as 130 thousand years and resemble tools of about 700 thousand years ago.
The plausible dynamic could be the then hominids (possibly erectus) were able to create and master boats (of some sort and in some way) to get to the island – and with the tools.
The least likely arguments are that, later seafaring hominids took the tools there, or that, they were swept to the island by a disaster of some sort (less likely).
Now this is an even wilder finding: Tool making in the form of flakes is found on the Indonesian island of Flores, dated about million[xxxii] years ago.
Erectus thus would have crossed the Lombok Strait – the shorter distance between lands, and it is said it is before 800 thousand years ago.
Biologists believe the depth of the trait kept animals on either side isolated[xxxiii]. This is inspite of the sea level dropping in the Last Ice Age (AKA Pleistocene ice age – about 2 580 000 to 11 700 years ago).
So seafaring would have been used by the great Erectus. Days planning would be required, plus some sort of not so developed (as today) spoken language.
To me it seems gestured communication and some sort of worded speech would have been needed to build such tools and rafts.
Let’s see.
The start at simple
Daniel Everett, the linguist, often shows a simple point that, like computers communicate in simple ones and zeros – but can makes ranges of information – (colours, images of real things, graphics), language can also use basic sounds to confer varying meanings.
For instance, ‘A’ can make tones like ‘A’, ‘AAA’, or ‘AAAAAA.’ You can confer the first to mean a small tree, the second a medium tree and the third a big tree.
This is just an illustration of the meanings we can confer one sound or tone, but if extended for instance, we can confer different abstractions of meanings.
Although it is difficult to measure the brain’s memory[xxxiv] capacity intricately, we do know of course computers process calculations faster than humans exponentially (it takes you more time to calculate 6x3x6x5 – but not for computers). Like the human brain, computers started in basic terms, with slow speeds and low memories (than us).
For illustration, the 1974 Intel® 8080[xxxv] processor had 4500 transistors. Today an Apple’s iPhone 6 has 2 billion transistors[xxxvi]. You can guess the iPhone today is exponentially faster and has more memory.
The ENIAC[xxxvii] (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first computer and was built in 1945. It was designed primarily to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory.
It weighed about 27000kg, which is about 10 times the weight of a Rolls Royce Phantom, and its size was around one-third of a basketball court (2.4 m × 0.9 m × 30 m) – X.
Still today the iPhone 6 works exponentially faster and with bigger memory than this old big thing – just think of the varying mega sizes between the two.
Electronic devices get smaller and more agile as the years go by, a phenomenon described as Moore’s Law[xxxviii].
Over the evolution and improvement of computers, further innovations were possible. Video streaming could not have been possible with the then speeds.
Video streaming needed internet technology to be plausible (evolve for faster speed). Think of the evolution from 2G internet to 5G internet.
All these things are interrelated and interdependent. Improvement in one area allows an adjacent possible for another proprietary-to-novel improvement in another area or utility.
In the same sense, our language getting richer and complex meant a lady could properly articulate a novel idea of a dress to seamstress. The idea when made becomes part of the dress industry’s new lexicon and someone else could then add or improve on it to make something else proprietary-to-novel. So on and so forth.
The improvement of human language and computers meant more innovations could be made.
With the genus homo’s cognition to invent objects evidently increasing in number and diversity over millions of years, it suggests that we must have had the fortitude of cognition to evolve our sounds into articulate language.
Just like computer processing started basic and got complex, language started basic and got richer, nuanced and ambiguous – thus complex.
The same as most innovations: organisms (single cellular organisms evolved to multi cellular organisms with trillions of cells[xxxix], that can also speak, i.e. homo sapiens), cars, chairs, clothes, etc.
– – –
[i] How many languages are there in the world? | By Stephen R. Anderson https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world
[ii] What killed the dinosaurs? | By Sam Rae and Lisa Hendry https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/dinosaur-extinction.html
[iii] The Meanings of Chimpanzee Gestures | By Catherine Hobaiter and Richard W. Byrne | 21 July 2014 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214006678
[iv] Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning | By Kirsty E. Graham and colleagues | 27 February 2018 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825
[v] The Great Ape Dictionary http://greatapedictionary.ac.uk/
[vi] Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning | By Kirsty E. Graham and colleagues | 27 February 2018 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825
[vii] Young children use the same gestures as chimpanzees and gorillas | 11 September 2018 https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/st-andrews-scientists-find-that-young-children-use-the-same-gestures-as-chimpanzees-and-gorillas/
[viii] How lions strengthen their bonds https://moriti.co.za/lions-strengthen-bonds-kruger-national-park/
[ix] Ants Sense, and Follow, Trail Pheromones of Ant Community Members | Jaime M. Chalissery and colleague | November 2019 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6921000/
[x] Octopuses Are Surprisingly Social — and Confrontational, Scientists Find | By Mindy Weisberger | 14 October 2022 https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-lives.html
[xi] Bird communication https://birdfact.com/bird-behavior/communication
[xii] Exploring The Human-Ape Paradox: Tetsuro Matsuzawa – Teaching | University of California Television (UCTV) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HLw8ThAmxE
[xiii] Powers and prospects: Reflections on human nature and the social order | By Noam Chomsky
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/chomsky/powerandprospects.pdf
[xiv] The Descent of Man | By Charles Darwin | ISBN 9780241336212 | Originally published: 24 February 1871 https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/The_Descent_of_Man/BfstDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
[xv] What Was the First Life on Earth? | By Stephanie Pappas | 1 March 2017 https://www.livescience.com/57942-what-was-first-life-on-earth.html
[xvi] When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the evolution of modern intelligence
| 9 September 2020 https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-what-fossils-and-dna-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-modern-intelligence-143717#
[xvii] The anatomical and physiological basis of human speech production: adaptations and exaptations | By Ann MacLarnon | 18 September 2012 https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37200/chapter-abstract/327375238?redirectedFrom=fulltext
[xviii] The Evolution of Human Speech: Its Anatomical and Neural Bases | By Philip Lieberman https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/509092?journalCode=ca
[xix] Investigations | Stuart A. Kauffman | 1996 https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/safiwp/96-08-072.html
[xx] Homo erectus | By E Dubois | 1894 https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus
[xxi] Last appearance of Homo erectus at Ngandong, Java, 117,000–108,000 years ago | By Yan Rizal and colleagues | 18 December 2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1863-2
[xxii] Homo erectus skull find rewrites human history | By Helen Swinger | 08 APRIL 2020 https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2020-04-08-homo-erectus-skull-find-rewrites-human-history
[xxiii] Our ancestors may have left Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier than thought | By Ann Gibbons | 11 July 2018 https://www.science.org/content/article/our-ancestors-may-have-left-africa-hundreds-thousands-years-earlier-thought
[xxiv] Dated co-occurrence of Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus from Tham Khuyen Cave, Vietnam | By R Ciochon and colleague | 2 April 1996 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC39753/
[xxv] Early humans lived in Ethiopian highlands 2 million years ago | By Michael Marshall | 12 October 2023 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2397291-early-humans-lived-in-ethiopian-highlands-2-million-years-ago/
[xxvi] 800,000-Year-Old Homo Erectus Footprints Found In Eritrea | By Ben Taub | 18 June 2016 https://www.iflscience.com/800000-year-old-homo-erectus-footprints-found-eritrea-36386
[xxvii] A Review of Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel L. Everett | A review of by Raymond S. Weitzman | 2013 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659492/
[xxviii] Pedi https://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_pedi.html
[xxix] ‘English is a Germanic Language.’ What does this mean, and how true is it? | By Rory Byrne | 2010-2011 https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/10-11/1011byrnehistoryofenglish.pdf
[xxx] From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman: Phonology and Morphology | By Mildred Katharine Pope | Published by Manchester University Press | 1952 https://books.google.co.za/books?id=bcEtswEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:UOM39076006800366
[xxxi] On Crete, new evidence of very ancient mariners | John Noble Wilford 15 February 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16archeo.html
[xxxii] Hominins on Flores, Indonesia, by one million years ago | By Adam Brumm and colleagues | 17 March 2010 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08844
[xxxiii] Pleistocene sea level maps https://www.fieldmuseum.org/pleistocene-sea-level-maps
[xxxiv] The human brain: Search for natural intelligence | By Kamal Al-Malah | November 2021 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356412195_The_human_brain_Search_for_natural_intelligence
[xxxv] Intel 8080 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080
[xxxvi] Apple’s A8 SoC analyzed: The iPhone 6 chip is a 2-billion-transistor 20nm monster | By By Sebastian Anthony | 10 September 2014 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/189787-apples-a8-soc-analyzed-the-iphone-6-chip-is-a-2-billion-transistor-20nm-monster
[xxxvii] ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) | By Robert Sheldon and Ivy Wigmore https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/ENIAC#
[xxxviii] Moore’s law 10 November 2023 https://www.britannica.com/technology/Moores-law
[xxxix] How many cells are in the human body? New study provides an answer | By Emily Cooke | 20 September 2023 https://www.livescience.com/health/anatomy/how-many-cells-are-in-the-human-body-new-study-provides-an-answer#