“This is gift-giving, on the video. This is intentional communication. And you see the symbol-building—the creature constructing analogues of the symbols it projects on its own skin from other objects as well. It built a whole sequence of symbols there on the seafloor out of bottles, answering the symbol we built. That’s writing—transferring the images on its skin to other mediums, recognizing the symbols it produces on its skin when it sees them constructed from other media, and arranging objects itself to create those shapes. I don’t imagine it learned how to do it just to talk to us: it must have been doing this, or something like it, before. You saw the symbols we found on the beach and underwater in response to our own, which were the same as those it produced in its ‘speech.’ And now this even more sophisticated response. How far is it, really, from that kind of building of symbols out of objects to tool use, and then to this carving? All of these tendencies are interrelated.”

“But your theory was that they emerged because of pressures humans have been putting on their environment—the ‘underwater ice age’ we created. Are you saying they became this sophisticated in a few hundred years?”

“No,” Ha said. “That can’t be right. I realize that. They must have been here all along. I was thinking of things, again, through our human lens. I was making it about us. Now I think they have been evolving in parallel with us, likely for thousands of years. We may have touched off something—some kind of emergence—by putting pressure on them, encroaching on their territories—but we didn’t spark this evolution. It belongs to them, and them alone. The process must have begun long before humankind put our first boats in the water. That’s the thing about humans—we think everything is about us. We attribute everything to our own actions. I’m not immune to that bias. But I was wrong. This is about them, not us. What we are seeing is clear—and we’ll find more evidence of it, I am sure. They are carving things from coral and shell, making and using tools. Evrim and I joked that they are in their Seashell Age. That idea of naming ages according to technology is another human metaphor, misapplied here. Their environment limits technological progress, but we have no idea how advanced their culture is. Every indication is that we are looking at a civilization that is highly sophisticated. Remember the Shapesinger? That long, poetic performance? That’s storytelling. I’m sure of it. So, I understand your skepticism—but there is skepticism, and there is naysaying.”