Long-haul tourists visiting South Africa are always fascinated by the clicks of isiXhosa. Foreign to their ears, the eighteen click consonants can be grouped into three types: the ‘c’ is a dental click made by the tongue at the back of the mouth, the lateral ‘x’ is made by the tongue at the sides of the mouth, and the alveolar ‘q’ is made by the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth.

IsiXhosa is part of the Nguni language group, which also includes Zulu and southern and northern Ndebele. Yet few of these or the other South African vernacular languages have clicks, and those that do have them use them far less. How is it that isiXhosa came to use clicks so commonly?

One clue comes from the other languages of southern Africa that also make use of clicks – and there are lots of them.

This essay grew out of several threads of commentary on Graham Hancock, the author of numerous bestselling books about ancient human pre-history, whose work I had encountered many times over the years. Many millions of people seem to accept Hancock’s radically challenging ideas uncritically, so I thought someone needed to defend mainstream science and put Hancock’s alternative archaeological theories into perspective. What follows is an original essay stitched together from my notes for the show, my postmortem blog about it afterward, my Scientific American column about Hancock’s work, and a few thoughts about the book he published after our studio collision. I like Graham very much as a person, despite our differences over scientific issues, and through correspondence we became friends. He is a warm, thoughtful, caring, generous, and intelligent man whose life’s work I find compelling even while rejecting its central premise, with which this essay shall engage.

I originally penned this essay in the summer of 2018, stimulated by a Twitter exchange I had with Elon Musk, itself triggered by the SpaceX CEO’s previously announced decision to colonize Mars. This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there. Surely not, but what source for research would a team of social engineers (let’s call them) working at SpaceX (or NASA, since it too plans to send people to Mars in the coming decades) access? There are no working models. Or are there? There are. Since it is Earthlings going to Mars, experiments in governance on the Blue Planet are a useful resource for lessons on how to govern the Red Planet. This essay, originally published in Quillette, is my modest contribution to future Martians on what they should take with them when they slip the surly bonds of earth.