The Earth Was Silent For 4 Billion Years
Animals made no noise for 90% of the planet’s life. Now industrial noise threatens the “biophony”
We often think of the natural world as noisy — beautifully so.
When I used to camp in Ontario as a Boy Scout, the night was alive with crickets, and when we were up further north, the occasional howl of a wolf or scream of a fox. When I talk to scientists who’ve worked in rainforests, they’ll talk of the cry of birds, each to each, the chatter of monkeys, and the thrum of insects in the moist air.
Forests, in other words, are filled with the sound of communication. Oceans, too. Animals talk to each other a lot. Maybe they’re warning each other of danger, or defending their territory, or trying to impress a mate. Either way, part of what’s so magical about nature is the noise of nature’s conversations.
I was thus surprised to learn that this chatter is, in the history of our planet, a quite recent evolution.
In his recent book Sounds Wild and Broken, David George Haskell — a professor of biology and environmental studies — estimates that for billions of years, perhaps 90% of Earth’s existence, there was no audible communication by animals.
Sure, there were natural noises, like the sounds of wind and rustling plants. But the earliest animals weren’t audible communicators. They were silent.
As Haskell writes in The Scientist …
For more than 90 percent of Earth’s history, it seems, no animals sang or cried. No creatures called when the seas first filled with complex animal life or when reefs first rose. The land’s primeval forests contained no singing insects or vertebrates. These ancient times had sound — wind, waves, thunder, geologic murmurs, and the splash, scrabble, and crunch of moving, feeding animals — but hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution unfolded in communicative silence.
It wasn’t that communication wasn’t happening. It was! Cells communicate with chemicals; plants send carbon to one another; bacteria network together.
It’s just that early life literally didn’t have the physical equipment necessary to make intentional sound. From Haskell’s book …
