Humanity is a pejorative term to everything but humans. Hominin leaves an apocalypse in its evolutionary wake. These and other lessons emerge as Dr. Victoria Acton and her team of scientists attempt to enable human-animal communication. She believes that natural communication bypasses the five senses. The approach is powerful, but she loses sight of the risks of success. The consequences become clear when their research institute comes under siege from powerful and corrupt forces. A frightening undiscovered species happens upon their vineyard at the same time. It doesn't speak, but can share its mind.
Dr. Acton pursues these unlikely coincidences and begins to discover how humans related to Nature before we spoke. We witness the emerging species, Homo sapiens, migrating out of Africa and eastward from the Mediterranean coast fifty thousand years ago. A young girl named Autumn is granted a vision of Nature, the first of generations, that spans from creation through a million years of hominid wars. Fast forward to the present day and Autumn's descendants are on the verge of a scientific breakthrough when they discover this history at the same time that they encounter man-made obstacles, a forbidding aphonic visitor, and a self-destructive moral dilemma.
Before We Spoke embeds Dr. Acton's quest for communication with animals in the mysterious dialectic of human knowledge. The story turns on its head the notion of humanity's struggle against nature for survival and leaves one questioning one's own relationship with Nature, and what it means to be human and sentient.