Human prehistory is studded with remarkable skills, from walking to talking to throwing, long before the emergence of Homo sapiens. Languaging may have accompanied bipedality emerging with Australopithecines (Falk 2025. The botanic age: Planting the seeds of human evolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025). Throughout hominization, our ancestors explored and examined environments and social worlds through sight, hands, and minds, eventually mediating with tools and toys. Early humans, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, migrated across continents, modified landscapes and biomes, interacted with one another, and shared genes, ideas, and technologies for over 300,000 years. They sustained themselves through foraging and left incidental and intentional marks on rock faces and in caves, thus narrating themselves into the future. Approximately 10,000 years ago, the Neolithic era ushered in a transition from foraging to farming, allowing some humans to specialize in crafting tools and toys and to establish permanent settlements. This sedentary lifestyle led to the accumulation of more goods and ideas, rendering further ideas about culture. Five thousand years ago, more durable marks on now portable substrates began to represent, rather than describe, objects and actions. Writing and reading caught on, but modern symbols lack the affective connection to our ancestral inner and outer realities.