ABSTRACT
Fossil and anthropological evidence show that nonverbal communication and visual artifacts preceded verbal language and writing by tens of thousands of years and played a critical role in producing modern Homo sapiens. This chapter focuses on areas of media research that offer conceptual traction and growing evidence of why images matter in our quest to understand the human condition at a point when it is recontoured by the contemporary media ecosystem. The evolution of speech remains largely unanswered because fossil evidence offers little insight on the soft muscle and ligaments required. Given the history of human vision and the research evidence of visual primacy emerging from multiple disciplines, all media might not be equal in facilitating the media equation. Thus, images are readily understood because their content directly corresponds to objects in the physical environment and the production techniques used in packaging full-motion visuals simulate human perception.
