The “40,000-year-old writing” headline is a bit ahead of the evidence. What researchers have actually found is that Ice Age caves are full of recurring abstract marks — dots, lines, Y-shapes, grids — that show up across sites and cultures. That’s fascinating on its own, because it suggests early humans were tracking things and passing on symbolic systems.
A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.
So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language.
I have had the privilege of touring some of the French caves with these paintings, and it is a profoundly moving experience to face a wall of hand stencils that is tens of thousands of years old. From the sizes of the hands, it seems clear that a community had made them, both little children and grown adults. The marks are so incredibly old, and yet it’s easy to visualize the people holding up their hands and blowing ocher on them, leaving a shadow behind. I don’t know if it’s possible to still visit these caves today —- we were on a National Geographic tour led by paleoanthropologist Don Johanson, discoverer of “Lucy”, and he has long since retired —- but it’s well worth your time if you ever get a chance to see them.
Thank you for this link. This whole over painting thing, it just, I felt like im the only person on the planet shocked by it. The second I arrive in italy I was told yes thats the painting of the last supper. And I was like wtf, it looks freshly painted. I read a placque which said somethign like ( due to the poor damp conditions of the room) the painting needed constant restoration.
I was like wtf so basically non of this shit is original?
Noone else seemed to even consider this.
Im sure poepl ein the art world come to terms with it, but I dont think anyone outside the field even conceives of what a restoration normally is
No. Linguists make a distinction between "writing" and "proto-writing". Generally speaking, proto-writing involves using abstract symbols for some particular use case, historically it was common for accounting. You draw a sheep and put five tally marks next to it to indicate you have five sheep, that kind of thing. Proto-writing is considerably older than true writing, among the earliest widely known examples would be clay tokens known as "bulla" [1] from at least 8000 BCE
Proto-writing can be very complex (I remember reading a book where a linguist calls mathematical notation "proto-writing"), but it's not "true writing" until it's capable of communicating essentially any idea you can express in spoken language (it's hard to write "I miss my cat Whiskers" in mathematical symbols) in at least a partly phonetic way (all true writing languages are phonetic to some extent). The earliest examples of that is Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000 BCE. Whatever this discovery is, it's not true writing.
Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.
Early Sumerian symbols depicting kinds of goods (wheat, sheep, beer, etc.), and marks next to these to indicate quantities, are classed as proto-writing.
There's also more general use of symbols to represent ideas or groups, like a cross representing Jesus or Christianity, for example, which aren't classed as writing
> Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.
I don't think this is the proper definition, since by this standard, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese ideograms, Norse runes and many others would not be considered writing; and any attempt to notate sign languages would not be writing by definition.
Instead, writing is a direct and consistent correspondence between marks and elements of human language (alphabets and abjads represent speech sounds, various ideographic systems represent semantics, you can have hybrids etc). This still makes sure that tallies or just general symbols or icons are not a form of writing, but it doesn't require any phonetic aspect to it either.
All true written languages are phonetic to some extent, even though they may not be alphabetical the way English is. Chinese characters have phonetic components indicating tone and pronunciation, Egyptian hieroglyphs are largely syllabic, Norse runes are alphabetic like English. In Chinese and Egyptian, there are purely non-phonetic symbols representing ideas (and other things like determinatives), but most have some kind of phonetic meaning (this is my understanding at least).
There's a spectrum of how phonetic a language is, where Finnish is on one end (sounds very closely align with spelling) and Chinese characters on the other, but all written languages are phonetic to some degree.
Yes, I would just add as clarification that from my learning of (Mandarin) Chinese, each character is unambiguously associated with a syllable (including tone), so if you know the syllable corresponding to the character, you should be able to read a sentence exactly (modulo occasional changes to the tones of some syllables to make it flow better). (If we defined "phonetic" to have that meaning then Chinese is actually very phonetic!)
The converse is not the case: Chinese is very homophonic so there are a lot of syllable (sounds) that have many different meanings and hence characters associated with them.
I should explain a little further what I mean: there are "pure" ideograms even in English, like the & and % characters. These unambiguously refer to the words "and" and "percent", but the way they're written gives no clue whatsoever to a reader on how they're pronounced. If you had gone your entire life reading and writing English but somehow never encountered them, the way they're written is entirely unhelpful. Emoji are an even more abstract example, that don't even correspond to any word at all, just usually indicating mood or something like that.
It's a common misconception that all Chinese characters are like that, but my understanding is that while there are many, many more ideograms in Chinese than English, something like 80% of the characters do in some way indicate pronunciation (even if it's just something like tone) or use the "rebus principle" or something like that. So again, it's a spectrum, but all writing systems are phonetic to some extent. Human's wouldn't be able to use it to communicate effectively otherwise.
I will say that I'm not a linguist, nor can I read or write a word of Mandarin Chinese, and will happily stand corrected. This is just what I've picked up from reading books about the history and development of writing.
Norse runes are just an alphabet. As long as your language uses the same set of sounds, you can write with them today.
People get confused about them because there's a tie-in with the old Germanic religions where they're used by the gods for divination, and the neopagans have adopted them for that purpose. But they're really just a set of alphabets optimized for carving into wood.
> writing is a ... correspondence between marks and elements of human language
Yes, this is what I had in mind by saying "speech", but you're right, the connection to language is the essential part, and sound just happens to be the paradigmatic medium of human language
Written numbers and math were born out of accounting. Who owed how much to whom. This could be similar to that, although I think the societies of that time were collectivist enough to not worry much about debt.
> A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.
> So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language
Okay, so what's the bar for "written language" then?
The specialists in this field appear to be using some criteria for "written language" but it is not clear to me how that criteria might accept maths symbols or maybe roman numerals to indicate counters as a written language while discarding a notation system.
Personally, I would consider that any form of intentional knowledge transmission a "written language".
Scratch a line onto a rock each time you see a full moon? That's written language.
Paint handprints on a cave wall? That's written language too.
Discovery doesn't fail your criteria, however I don't think most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language. Certainly doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Well, for me the intention matters; is the intention communication (and yes, art is communication as well - it communicates the artists feelings at the time)?
If the intention is to communicate how many moons have passed, why is tally marks not considered written language?
We talk about the language of mathematics, and no one bats an eye, but tally marks still fall into the category of language of mathematics.
I am seeing the stated criteria as a distinction without a difference: The intentional mark `5` signifying how many moons have passed is somehow different to the intentional mark `|||||`, but no one is explaining what the difference is.
I don't think the linguists would consider arabic numerals on their own to be a language either. The main distinction, as I understand it, is having something like a grammar, i.e. a set of consistent rules about how to arrange the symbols to have meaning beyond just the sum of the meaning of each individual symbol. So no matter how you mark down your count, it's not language until you have some consistent pattern of signifying that that means how many moons have passed, or how many people are in the local community, or something like that.
It's not impossible that there's something here, but I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists.
I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.
I would prefer to see pictures of these symbols, and their in-situ neighbors, and a corresponding symbol across a wide distance that's within at most 2-300 years.
We want to feel that language has commonalities, that people traveled long distances and times and kept some common bond. It might even make intuitive sense, if the people share cultural similarities. But it often results in linguists making motivated decisions without enough evidence, like happened with the "Altaic"[1] language family.
"I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists." Speaking as a linguist... you're right, it doesn't convince me. Nearly all languages have more sounds (phonemes) than the symbols shown in most of those infographics--more consonants, even (many early writing systems only represented consonants). All languages have more distinct syllables than any of those symbol systems (many early writing systems were syllabic). And obviously all languages have far more words (or morphemes) than any of those systems.
What would be more convincing? A sequence of a few dozen symbols in some particular location, and likely to have been written at the same time (rather than centuries or millennia apart), by the same person (so if there were handprints, the handprints would be the same person's hand(s)), where the number of recognizable symbols is twenty or more. I don't say that would be all that would be needed to convince linguists, but it would be a start.
Can we say "language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one"? A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound, and taken at face value the separation on the map would seem to imply that any spoken language could have evolved dramatically out of sync with any physical representation. I can't think of any reason to think that - if you assume a phonetic interpretation - a symbol shared between North America and southern Africa would be pronounced at all similarly in both locations when the marks were made. The distances alone argue against a phonetic interpretation to me.
Do hobo signs count as a language? That seems intuitively much closer to what this might be. How much structure do you need?
"Can we say 'language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one'?" Of course: sign languages. But sign languages have even more "phonemes" than spoken languages do, so this doesn't help the hypothesis.
And yes, "A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound": that's what hieroglyphic writing systems were, more or less. Again, more distinct symbols, not fewer.
"Do hobo signs count as a language?" Depends on how you define "language". As most linguists would define language, though, the answer is no. All normal spoken or signed languages have oodles of structure (grammar). Pidgin languages probably do not, but that's just the first generation or so, after which they gain structure and are technically creoles. (Some creoles have the word "pidgin" in their names, like Tok Pisin of New Guinea, and Hawaiian Pidgin, but they're complex enough to justify the term "creole.")
Odd that you say “nearly all languages have”, which would include that other languages you yourself can think of, do not have “more sounds[…]symbols…”
The problem I have with “experts” when it comes to this kind of dogma challenging thing is that they are usually extremely biased and limited by that dogma.
Let me put it this way, if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language. Ironically, to me at least, the limited ands relatively consistent nature of the symbols itself actually qualifies it as language, not disqualifies it.
Two languages I can think of that have approximately the number of phonemes that some of those sign lists have are Hawai'ian (at least 13 phonemes, depending on how you analyze vowel length and diphthongs) and Central Rotokas (11 phonemes). But that low a number is extremely rare among languages.
"...if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language" Communication, yes. Language? Knowing nothing about Martians, I'd have to withhold judgement. On Earth, language is much more than just communication.
I’d also need to see statistics - without any selection bias introduced by what the researcher finds interesting.
There may be 30 or so “common” patterns that appear globally - that would be very interesting if the total pool of symbols was say 50 but much less so if there are thousands of different symbols.
There are instances in South America, North Africa, and Australia, where some prehistoric person took the foot of an animal such as a large bird or lizard, with feet that resemble human hands, and stenciled round it onto a wall. Is the repetition of this trope over wide distances just a freaky coincidence? Yes.
Well, there's probably something mimetic going on, like the idea of stenciling round your hand at all. "Neat! I'm gonna do that too! I'm gonna get my little brother to do it! And my chicken! And this leftover lizard foot!" Memes spread easily. Kilroy was here, nobody writes that one on walls any more, and hands were stenciled over thousands of years, but we have an evolving culture now.
> Kilroy was here, nobody writes that one on walls any more, and hands were stenciled over thousands of years, but we have an evolving culture now.
Not in the relevant sense. Nobody writes Kilroy was here anymore, but we continue to do hand outlines. That's not a practice that has changed over the last 50,000 years.
I suggest the symbols are morospiles. That's a term from Greek meaning "stupid blemish". This too can be tested: get a bunch of stupid people together to paint on a wall, see what marks they make, measure the degree of similarity to cave art, write a paper about it titled "Maybe They Were Stupid?". Repeat this a hundred times and you've got a field of study to cite authoritatively.
Your statement is a narrative illusion. Science is about pattern seeking and then correlating data about those patterns. They have zilch to do with one another.
Without a time machine, that opinion is no more valid than people keeping a consistent mapping and storytelling language by drawing in the dirt. There is evidence on both sides.
For example, the picture of the entrance stone on this page uses spirals:
Not so. As these are isolated occurring form constants popping up outside of any possible diffusion, their universality prior to symbolic or pictographic coherences indicate an interim state between expression and symbol.
The rush to claim these are a language is unsupported and is quite suspicious of a retrofitting that's prone to pseudoscience.
I would read Paleoperformance and Paleopoetics for discussions about pre-literate, pre-symbolic cultures from the archeological evidence.
Imposing intent or causality onto these is a bit bizarre.
The spirals from Newgrange. Those are indeed claimed to "resemble phosphenes" in Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? which this person posted in another comment. They are neolithic, which is a very long way from paleolithic, not just in time but in development of ideas. The paper has another montage of images with the Gundestrup cauldron in it! That was made in the small hundreds AD. It's just a grab-bag of anything that looks shamanic to support the thesis "maybe they were tripping", about everybody everywhere throughout time, and yes, fair point, maybe they were tripping, it's worth bearing in mind. Also, maybe they were stupid. So what? Is this a solution to any problem?
I'm interested to know if the top left character in both Europe and North America actually looks like that. It's the radical for roof in Chinese. Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.
A lot of these are so simple its not unbelievable to think that people simply came up with the same things as everyone else inna similar time without ever meeting. Im not seeing swastikas or equilateral triangles, just shapes that look to be simple representations of natural things perhaps.
I loved the infographic, although it's clearly overly simplistic it does suggest a sense of where there is no claimed extent of a symbol-type, which might in some cases support broad patterns of domains of exchange. It generates interest.
The real linguistic question is not whether the art had representational value and thus was a form of communication: this is known and clear, simply through the frequent nature of pictographic forms of recognizable elements of the environment.
Rather, it is more to what extent there was a systematization of the pictographs through phonetic or phonosyllabic use, and to what extent any such symbol repetition indicates a depth of shared culture across spatiotemporal divides. At what point does it count as 'writing'?
In general, there was clearly shared culture (technology meant that options were somewhat limited, and we have traced major changes such as the ingress of dingoes from Asia to Australia). What we are learning recently is the hitherto dismissed extent to which disparate branches of hominids survived and persisted in pockets across time, how we mixed with them and adopted their features. IMHO grand colonial theories of migration (often patriarchic/single-event/unidirectional) are falling away as novel evidence such as mtDNA shows far longer admixture and pluralistic bidirectional flows of culture, genes and technology.
Personally, having seen some ancient cave paintings near the northern Burmese and Vietnamese borders as well as in Australia and most recently in a book on Baja California, the similarities are striking, but this does not mean people teleported across the globe. It seems early peoples globally worked a broadly similar techno-social palette to leave marks across time, persisting their identity and expression in ways which probably marked social presence, status, ritual and interpretation. Stories became written and illustrated, but only in summary. Usually we cannot recover the actual content because all that is left are cues, other times modern anthropology preserved traditional interpretation. We often see presumed or literal figures, animals (spirits? gods? prey? food?), weapons, abstract markings, celestial bodies. Things that would be notable in such a society. 20th century anthropology has shelves of studies on this stuff. Here in Sydney, a city of 4+ million people, there are many aboriginal sites with engravings of people, emu, fish, dolphins, turtles, whales, kangaroos, reptiles, etc. Further north, even far inland, there exists rock art of early European ships sighted on the coast, suggesting use for record, story-telling, teaching.
We only know of the symbol use (if they were symbols) that happened on media that lasted tens of millennia. If they even painted symbols on deeply underground cave walls, they likely had them on many less durable surfaces as well. There could have been a huge oral tradition augmented by drawn memorization aids on durable but not that durable media. That augmented oral tradition would then occasionally, every few dozen generations or so, due to some exceptional circumstances, spill over to the near-eternal medium of a cave wall.
> I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.
That infographic has bigger problems.
>> The similarities suggest the marks are more than just random scribbles
Except here are some of "the marks":
x # |||| * 一 (hand)
OK, a hand is a complex shape. It does suggest there's more going on than random scribbles. It suggests...
...
...that the people who drew a hand had hands.
Every single one of the other marks -- and the hand mark, too -- are things you could expect to find if you gave a small child some paper and crayons.
Worth noting that the hand “mark” is actually just a handprint—put hand on wall, spit pigment, done. To continue your comparison, it is essentially finger painting.
It's literally a bunch of graphic design output showing clean font glyphs! Needless to say, there is no, I mean zero evidence of any kind of symbology of the fidelity being shown. You'll get a petroglyph here or there, and that's it. Stretching those across whole continents and inferring "language" is just ridiculous.
Well yeah, the illustration on some website (that may or may not actually be in her book) isn't scholarly evidence, that's true. But you're not giving her enough credit here, by a long shot!
1. She's been doing this since 2011, her TED talk a decade ago racked up 2M views, and this book landed a positive review from the curator of the Smithsonian's "hall of human origins"; she's not some rando. Here's her (somewhat outdated?) Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QaDkX_UAAAAJ
2. The actual evidence here is supposedly "a unique database that holds more than 5,000 signs from almost 400 sites across Europe". It could still be misleading of course, but it's a lot more than just a website diagram.
3. You putting "language" in scare-quotes is completely unnecessary, as that's not what she's arguing at all. Rather, she's saying that these symbols should be treated as a milestone on the way to written language ("first indicators of our human ancestors capacity for symbolic meaning"), not full grammars in-and-of-themselves. Given that evolutionary linguistics is in a "pre-Gallilean" phase at best (to quote Chomsky), I'd say any well-cited contributions to the field should be welcomed! Maybe she's wrong, but in a way that leads us to what's right.
I came to the comments to be dubious as well, so I appreciate where you're coming from. But IMO "ridiculous" is going way too far...
> You putting "language" in scare-quotes is completely unnecessary, as that's not what she's arguing at all.
... then why is it in the headline?!
I'm not discounting the possibility that someone somewhere underneath this has done something approximating real science[1]. I'm saying that the link I clicked on, and the hypothesis it's pushing, is garbage. And I stand by that.
[1] Though "I made a database" might not rise to the level of clickworthy.
The uniform scale of the symbols is deceptive since the source drawings have substantially different sizes. The hand outline is hand sized, for instance.
The illustration is of course just glyphs, but plenty of such symbols are found in e.g. paintings and stone and bone carvings. Not saying it's writing, but these kinds of symbols are not uncommon findings.
If you give me a stick and some sand these are some of the most common things I would be able to draw. I’m not sure that makes it a universal language. Every culture with a snake is going to have a squiggle line that looks like a snake. Everyone has a hand so they will make a hand print, etc. An X, a spiral, something that looks like a branch.
Yeah, but for every single instance of every single one of those glyphs, someone needs to publish a paper substantiating similarity to whatever that archetype is. You can't just put up a pretty font diagram and announce "They use the hand symbol here".
This is the same thing as all those stories about the Impossible Black Hole That Should Not Be There illustrated with something the graphics department threw together in photoshop.
For anybody into prehistoric abstract symbols who hasn't encountered this, "The Signs of All Times 1988" [1] is a super interesting study. Also very readable for the majority of us who are not in the field. Pairs nicely with Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams [2] and any mid-tier Cabernet.
And just my two cents as an under-qualified former art history teacher...
It's fascinating and totally valid to try to analyze these symbols as proto-linguistic, but it can be even more interesting to imagine the cognitive roll these kinda of abstract symbols might have played outside the scope of language as we understand it.
Trying to imaging the structure of the mind and experiencing reality with a complete absence of language can be immensely mind-expanding, even just as a thought experiment. At least it was for me.
As we were taught in entoptic studies, these are not elements of a proto language, they are externalizations of the occipital/retinal that both reference the brain and reference space - together.
They are the basis for a spatial language of topological parts that have yet to be realized but does integrate with the plastic arts. ie are these the source of pictograms as language? Probably not. Is there are continuity with Kurgan or Chinese ideograms? We can't find them. Is there a continuity between counting tokens and alphabets? Yes, there's a stronger case for that.
Kids will independently re-invent most of these in their first few years of life. Circle? Five circles? Hand outline? One line? Perpendicular lines? Multiple perpendicular lines? Spiral? Being passed down thousands of years is not the best explanation for them being found everywhere.
I'm not saying these symbols qualify as a language, but this argument against it does not hold up.
There is no such thing as a child developing "independently" in the sense that you are using it here, and anyone who would try would be rightfully sued for child abuse in most countries.
Even a child with prelingual deafness who is denied Sign language and access to Deaf culture (and I recommend looking up what terrible impact that has on such a child's development and quality of life), is still surrounded by human symbols from the day they open their eyes.
Granted, it's not the best explanation. But stone age people did pass things down thousands of years.
For instance, the Alta rock carvings site was used for about 5000 years. They added new ones for some 200 generations. They managed to avoid wiping out the older markings, they managed to avoid the entire place being covered with scribbles. They definitively preferred this site, not any random suitable site, for their petroglyph narrative, whatever it meant. If place-bound cultural continuity can be so strong, who's to say something like it can't have survived journeys too?
(But yes, petroglyphs clearly aren't a language as we know it)
That symbol that looks like an arrow pointing up with three lines coming out of the point has been seen on three different UFO crafts, including in the infamous Socorro incident investigated by Project Blue Book: https://labyrinths.xyz/posts/the-socorro-insignia-and-indus-...
One of my favourite kooks is an artist named Stanislaw Szukalski[0]. Although he had some heinously racist ideas (yeti inbreeding with humans), his art skills are unmatched, and his critical analysis of ancient art led him to develop the concept of the "Protong", the 'mother tongue of all humanity', which - he claims - can be observed in the style and means of much ancient art. His theory was that, before The Cataclysm™, humanity was united across the globe and spoke the same language, and after the fall of that ancient civilization, the survivors attempted to warn the future by encoding messages in their art.
Although he inhabits the lunatic fringe, I still find the concept of Protong highly interesting, and now that more settled minds are looking at the possibility of a global language, I do have to wonder just how much he got right in terms of identifying the language, itself, in ancient art. I also wonder whether modern researchers could gain anything from his investigation, using more appropriate techniques to glean fact from fiction.
Anyone else know of Szukalski, and can weigh in on this? I confess that my interest is pretty glib (because the yeti thing is repugnant), but I can't help feeling, deep down inside, that maybe the Protong idea has some legs ..
"Beginning in 1940, Szukalski devoted most of his time to examining the mysteries of prehistoric ancient history of mankind, the formation and shaping of languages, faiths, customs, arts, and migration of peoples. He tried to unravel the origin of geographical names, gods, and symbols that have survived in various forms in various cultures. Through his research in these subjects, Szukalski claimed to have discovered Polish origins for various ancient places and people, in a language called Protong."
Languages develop too quickly to be traced that far. Even if there was a protolanguage (there could have been one in Africa I guess) by the time continents were explored, the languages would have no relation to any "ur-language".
The point with Protong, however, is that there was a globally-spanning civilization which did not have the latency we commonly associate with early human development. The language was supposedly spoken globally by a world-spanning human civilization which was destroyed by the cataclysm, requiring us all to re-develop ourselves.
Like I said, Szukalski was a kook. But contrasting his findings with more scientifically appropriate methods, is certainly of great interest to those of us following along...
To be fair, in the video TED talk by Genevieve von Petzinger, she does not claim these are "writing", instead calling the symbols "graphic communication". So not a language, much less writing, but still conveying a shared meaning between the sender (writer) and the recipient (observer).
She does admit speculating these symbols could be clan or family identifiers, but does not attempt to ascribe any meaning beyond that.
I wonder, could writing appear because of need for accounting? For example, the ruler of a group of tribes needs to know which village paid the tribute, how much they owe, how much warriors they can provide and so on.
With Sumerian cuneiform, some of the earliest examples appear to be inventories and maybe contracts and exchange records. For example this [1] appears to be a food ration token of some kind: Mouth bowl barley 4.
That's about 3100 BC or so. Five hundred years or so later, in developed cuneiform, those symbols still exist. By then they are usually abstracted into unrecognizable wedge shapes and lines. And by then they are definitely words, which had a reading aloud in Sumerian.
But back in 3100 BC, it's an open question whether they were thinking of the symbols that way.
There is an intermediate stage. One of the things you might want to account for is people. And their professions. [2] Again it is unclear if these are words. Eye city. (Guard?) King bull. (Chief herdsman?) What appears to be three tiers of gardener. Getting sophisticated. Within two centuries of that, we start to see the use of the pictograms to represent other values phonetically. A head is read as SAG. So if you want to write a name that has a syllable including SA or SAG you use the head symbol. And this is one of the key steps toward writing. But it is used sparingly at first. Names. Place names. Nouns for which there is no pictogram.
That is to say, more than 90% of the tablets continue to be beer receipts and the like. Around the same time, the kings and priests start to account and take inventory of their ancestors and battles as well. The language was probably Sumerian but there's almost no evidence of the Sumerian language itself in the writing yet. So few words written non-pictographically, no case markers or inflections or adpositions written yet. About 2600 BC the Sumerians start writing with grammatical markers, and the set of pictograms has developed into a system that can represent most of the sounds of Sumerian. And they start writing epic poetry and letters of complaint about their copper shipments being late.
I got a bit sidetracked sorry! My point is that the base-60 numerical system is fully developed at the earliest stage. It is used with the early pictograms.
Something similar may be true for the other meso- civilization in Mesoamerica. There's a fragment of an Olmec or Epi-Olmec stele with a date in the Long Count that, by Maya reckoning, would be in 36 BC. This is hundreds of years before the earliest examples of what is certainly writing, with the Maya. Things are very fragmentary so there is little certainty. But it seems possible Mesoamerican civilizations were recording absolute dates with their calendars, hundreds of years before they developed the ability to write arbitrary text.
Maybe the context where in the cave the symbol has been found could indicate what it meant. Furthermore symbols could be related to the surroundings of the cave to give future cave dwellers information about the area.
Let's ignore the headline itself for a moment and try to take the rest of the article at face value.
The idea that is being plainly communicated here is that there's a single system of symbols that is so well-understood that it gets passed along to human populations in Siberia that then cross the Bering strait as well as the isthmus of Panama, and these populations over this period maintain this system with such fidelity that they're recognizable as descending from the SAME system of symbols that entirely separate populations in Europe and Southern Africa are also using.
I don't think an alternative intepretation is reasonable to take away from the "Consistent doodles" infographic or the phrasing like "early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents".
This is either earth-shaking news that demands an entirely new understanding of human heritage, or it's very obvious pseudo-science.
The article blurs the distinction between general symbolic representation and writing, which is specifically the symbolic representation of language. Thus this statement is self-contradictory: "[...] those prehistoric forms of writing, which include the earliest known hashtag marks, consisted of symbols nearly as universal as emoji." If the symbols were universal representations of concepts, then they were not representations of language, because different languages represent concepts in different ways. (Unless one supposes that at this time 40k years ago, only one language existed, which is unlikely.) The reference to hashtags also does not inspire confidence.
It's not new or surprising that there are cave drawings and petroglyphs that are much older than the oldest writing, nor that such art is symbolic in some sense. It would be surprising if this art was writing, but this article gives no indication of that.
I looked at that article. To call it speculative might be an understatement (although the authors are clear that what they are doing is speculating). It includes reasoning like this:
> Waller (2002) points out that the pictures often cluster in areas with enhanced acoustic properties. For instance, in the deep caves of Font-de-Gaume and Lascaux, pictures of hoofed animals such as bulls, bison, and deer appear in chambers in which the echoes, resonances, and reverberation created percussive sounds that resemble hoof beats7, as illustrated in Figure 2. In contrast to this, in chambers that are acoustically quiet, one finds pictures of felines (Waller, 1993a) or simple dots and handprints (Hoffman, 2014).
> Cave art, as analyzed by archeoacoustics, shows a flow of information from one modality to another: auditory to visual. The auditory modality is triggered by external input—thunder, rock tapping, music— and the auditory representation is mentally transformed into external, visual representation. This is a pure form of externalized symbolic thinking where information from one modality is transformed into representation in another modality. We speculate that this activity of information transfer across modalities allowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking to their conspecifics, as well as their ability to process acoustic and visual input as symbolic (i.e., to associate acoustic and visual stimuli to a given mental representation).
So. . . because cave paintings are found in places where sounds resonate, they helped us communicate symbolically. Uh-huh.
Later they list "striking similarities" between cave art and human language, including as separate points that they "are used for communication", that they "express actions, states, objects, and modification", and that they "externalize internal mental states". Ah yes, as opposed to all those other communication mechanisms which somehow communicate without externalizing internal mental states, and without expressing actions, objects, etc.
The article also heavily cites Chomsky at his most nonsensical (e.g., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497... ), where he speculates wildly about the evolution of language while clinging to tenets which are at best implausible from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., "the optimal conclusion about the nature of language would be that its basic principles are extremely simple"). And that's to say nothing of his upside-down view of language in which communication is regarded as secondary to its function as a "system of thought".
Again, to be fair, the Miyagawa article is up-front about being speculative. But even so, its speculation seems rather extreme and I don't see any actual data supporting the hypothesis that cave art is writing rather than just some form of symbolic representation.
> clinging to tenets which are at best implausible from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., "the optimal conclusion about the nature of language would be that its basic principles are extremely simple").
Are you pretending to know? This is an entire field of study, Paleolithic cave art references and phosphene phenomena, there's hundreds of papers about this. We can verify the scales on cave walls and the distance to optic, literally where someone could stand to reexperience the entoptic.
It's not simply hypothesis, it's already at the theoretic stage, empirical evidence has been gathered from two fields. Any scientist knows that there are never conclusions, there are only regularities pointing to correlations within limits. These limits have been reached by matching scales.
Ah, so that's where the otherwise inexplicable symbol for a washing machine spin cycle comes from.
Ig you want to get _really_ conspiracy-theory-ish... doesn't that six star symbol look like the Pleiades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_in_folklore_and_liter... (Some have noted that the Pleiades has suspiciously similar myths associated with them, across the world.)
These aren't a "language" they're called entoptics or phosphenes. Calling this a language is like the other posts here, is pseudoscience.
Entoptics are actual neural gradient patterns of the retina and occipital externalized, from altered states, light-deprivation, trances even extreme expression.
Entoptics are well enough researched (Lewis-Williams, Entoptics: The Signs of All Times) that any New Scientist writer should have at least mentioned this.
40,000 years is 40 chances at other good milleniums occurring
Where cultures weren't using metals as the primary basis of infrastructure, there wouldn't be much evidence remaining of those cultures. Add in glaciers and everything is ground up, except in caves.
Or 300 chances! First homo sapiens was born around 300k years ago, and their culture rose and declined many times in many places. Around 40k years ago it did start to "monotonically accumulate" though.
The reason there are variations of the same-similar shapes all over the world is that different peoples in diverse locations saw the same “light shows” in the sky from various vantage points.
This riddle was solved 20+ years ago by Dr. Peratt and his collaborators, but I guess many more years will pass before his work on the subject is widely accepted or someone else with the “right credentials” in the social sciences rediscovers the same explanation and has better luck than a physicist who became wonderfully obsessed with petroglyphs.
Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity (2003)
That paper is pretty... out there, sorry. There's a reason people look for credentials -- to screen out work like this!
1. The random insinuation halfway through that ancient humans had secret advanced civilizations seems completely uncalled-for, and would put any discerning reviewer on edge. Which is I guess why this is in a plasma science journal and not an anthropology one?
2. AFAIK, the whole thing only works if A) aliens, B) Sol put off 10-100 times more radiation than it does today, or C) "another source of plasma were to enter the solar system" (???).
3. Figure 30 especially cracks me up, where he argues that a figure with hands and genitals isn't a human, but rather a geometric shape. IDK... seems like a reach. Ditto for explaining spirals as recordings of the sky rather than a basic shape found throughout nature right here on earth.
> The random insinuation halfway through that ancient humans had secret advanced civilizations seems completely uncalled-for, and would put any discerning reviewer on edge.
Are you referring to Peratt’s quoting Mallory? That section of the paper is simply a review of historical work on petroglyphs and insinuates nothing at all. Context is a thing.
Archaeoastronomy is a field that is borderline fringe science, in large part because it is really easy to overinterpret the data and find spurious correlations because there's just so many variables. To be taken seriously, you have to produce a lot of ancillary data to buttress the interpretation, for example showing that the claimed astronomical features have relevant cultural significance and hence would have reason to be specifically marked.
These papers aren't doing that. They're saying "hey, you can interpret pictograms as features of aurora," which is exactly the kind of argument you would make if you wanted to guarantee ostracization from the community. There's not an attempt to demonstrate a common source, there's not an attempt to analyze a complete context of petroglyphs (as opposed to individual ones) to demonstrate a coherent, single interpretation of a single event. Nope, it's just "some of these common petroglyphs look kind of like aurora features."
Yep, clearly you didn’t read the papers. Shapes that appear spontaneously in laboratory plasma are carefully compared with shapes made/drawn by humans all over the world at various times and locations in the distant past.
“Directionality and source” is literally the sub/title of the second paper and it explores what theory and evidence-data suggest.
Although the second paper had the term “archaeoastronomy” (only) in its index terms, it is confusing (at best) to categorize it that way as the phenomena manifested in Earth’s atmosphere not in outer space among the planets and stars.
I skimmed the papers, because I have not the time to read them in detail.
But let me tell you this: even as a non-expert, comparing the pictures of the claimed phenomenon with various pictures of petroglyphs it's pretty clear that the correlation is extremely loose. And there's nothing in the text I skimmed to address some of this misses.
Maybe you can tell me though. For the images that most identify as depictions of humans that the paper instead identifies as a toroidal flux tube around a plasma column because of the presence of two round dots: how does the presence of many similar human-like figures without those two dots match the same phenomenon?
To put it in really frank terms: this field is problematic in general because spurious correlation is really common. So any paper needs to start by demonstrating not merely correlation but something that makes it seem actually causative, some other factor to make me believe that it might be true. Without that link, Occam's Razor says it's just another thing on the heap of spurious correlations.
> how does the presence of many similar human-like figures without those two dots match the same phenomenon
Toroidal instability and shape-evolution is given considerable attention in the paper. The toroids fold and warp and what the human eye perceives will depend on the viewing angle. If you're looking at the toroid edge-on you get the "dot" effect, cf. Figure 31 in the first paper. The "double-dot" squatter petroglyphs are rarer, as that paper points out.
The “40,000-year-old writing” headline is a bit ahead of the evidence. What researchers have actually found is that Ice Age caves are full of recurring abstract marks — dots, lines, Y-shapes, grids — that show up across sites and cultures. That’s fascinating on its own, because it suggests early humans were tracking things and passing on symbolic systems.
A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.
So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language.
I have had the privilege of touring some of the French caves with these paintings, and it is a profoundly moving experience to face a wall of hand stencils that is tens of thousands of years old. From the sizes of the hands, it seems clear that a community had made them, both little children and grown adults. The marks are so incredibly old, and yet it’s easy to visualize the people holding up their hands and blowing ocher on them, leaving a shadow behind. I don’t know if it’s possible to still visit these caves today —- we were on a National Geographic tour led by paleoanthropologist Don Johanson, discoverer of “Lucy”, and he has long since retired —- but it’s well worth your time if you ever get a chance to see them.
I just hope they don’t do what they do in Italy and freshen them up by painting over them
Don't leave out the Americans on that one, especially if there's money to be made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_(Leonardo)
Thank you for this link. This whole over painting thing, it just, I felt like im the only person on the planet shocked by it. The second I arrive in italy I was told yes thats the painting of the last supper. And I was like wtf, it looks freshly painted. I read a placque which said somethign like ( due to the poor damp conditions of the room) the painting needed constant restoration.
I was like wtf so basically non of this shit is original?
Noone else seemed to even consider this.
Im sure poepl ein the art world come to terms with it, but I dont think anyone outside the field even conceives of what a restoration normally is
Not sure why I got a downvote, maybe there are people who aren't aware of how paintings are restored.
It's not possible to visit the caves for most people. They do have reconstructions of the more famous ones though (Lascaux, Crosquer, ...)
Actually, the notion these are entoptics suggests they are the roots of syntax.
Pretty sure the original claim was not that it was language, just a tally system rather than some undeciphered artistic meaning.
Isn't communicating symbolic thought through drawn symbols that are understood by multiple people the definition of writing?
No. Linguists make a distinction between "writing" and "proto-writing". Generally speaking, proto-writing involves using abstract symbols for some particular use case, historically it was common for accounting. You draw a sheep and put five tally marks next to it to indicate you have five sheep, that kind of thing. Proto-writing is considerably older than true writing, among the earliest widely known examples would be clay tokens known as "bulla" [1] from at least 8000 BCE
Proto-writing can be very complex (I remember reading a book where a linguist calls mathematical notation "proto-writing"), but it's not "true writing" until it's capable of communicating essentially any idea you can express in spoken language (it's hard to write "I miss my cat Whiskers" in mathematical symbols) in at least a partly phonetic way (all true writing languages are phonetic to some extent). The earliest examples of that is Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000 BCE. Whatever this discovery is, it's not true writing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)
Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.
Early Sumerian symbols depicting kinds of goods (wheat, sheep, beer, etc.), and marks next to these to indicate quantities, are classed as proto-writing.
There's also more general use of symbols to represent ideas or groups, like a cross representing Jesus or Christianity, for example, which aren't classed as writing
> Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.
I don't think this is the proper definition, since by this standard, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese ideograms, Norse runes and many others would not be considered writing; and any attempt to notate sign languages would not be writing by definition.
Instead, writing is a direct and consistent correspondence between marks and elements of human language (alphabets and abjads represent speech sounds, various ideographic systems represent semantics, you can have hybrids etc). This still makes sure that tallies or just general symbols or icons are not a form of writing, but it doesn't require any phonetic aspect to it either.
All true written languages are phonetic to some extent, even though they may not be alphabetical the way English is. Chinese characters have phonetic components indicating tone and pronunciation, Egyptian hieroglyphs are largely syllabic, Norse runes are alphabetic like English. In Chinese and Egyptian, there are purely non-phonetic symbols representing ideas (and other things like determinatives), but most have some kind of phonetic meaning (this is my understanding at least).
There's a spectrum of how phonetic a language is, where Finnish is on one end (sounds very closely align with spelling) and Chinese characters on the other, but all written languages are phonetic to some degree.
Yes, I would just add as clarification that from my learning of (Mandarin) Chinese, each character is unambiguously associated with a syllable (including tone), so if you know the syllable corresponding to the character, you should be able to read a sentence exactly (modulo occasional changes to the tones of some syllables to make it flow better). (If we defined "phonetic" to have that meaning then Chinese is actually very phonetic!)
The converse is not the case: Chinese is very homophonic so there are a lot of syllable (sounds) that have many different meanings and hence characters associated with them.
I should explain a little further what I mean: there are "pure" ideograms even in English, like the & and % characters. These unambiguously refer to the words "and" and "percent", but the way they're written gives no clue whatsoever to a reader on how they're pronounced. If you had gone your entire life reading and writing English but somehow never encountered them, the way they're written is entirely unhelpful. Emoji are an even more abstract example, that don't even correspond to any word at all, just usually indicating mood or something like that.
It's a common misconception that all Chinese characters are like that, but my understanding is that while there are many, many more ideograms in Chinese than English, something like 80% of the characters do in some way indicate pronunciation (even if it's just something like tone) or use the "rebus principle" or something like that. So again, it's a spectrum, but all writing systems are phonetic to some extent. Human's wouldn't be able to use it to communicate effectively otherwise.
I will say that I'm not a linguist, nor can I read or write a word of Mandarin Chinese, and will happily stand corrected. This is just what I've picked up from reading books about the history and development of writing.
Norse runes are just an alphabet. As long as your language uses the same set of sounds, you can write with them today.
People get confused about them because there's a tie-in with the old Germanic religions where they're used by the gods for divination, and the neopagans have adopted them for that purpose. But they're really just a set of alphabets optimized for carving into wood.
> writing is a ... correspondence between marks and elements of human language
Yes, this is what I had in mind by saying "speech", but you're right, the connection to language is the essential part, and sound just happens to be the paradigmatic medium of human language
Written numbers and math were born out of accounting. Who owed how much to whom. This could be similar to that, although I think the societies of that time were collectivist enough to not worry much about debt.
> A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.
> So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language
Okay, so what's the bar for "written language" then?
The specialists in this field appear to be using some criteria for "written language" but it is not clear to me how that criteria might accept maths symbols or maybe roman numerals to indicate counters as a written language while discarding a notation system.
Personally, I would consider that any form of intentional knowledge transmission a "written language".
Scratch a line onto a rock each time you see a full moon? That's written language.
Paint handprints on a cave wall? That's written language too.
How does this discovery fail my criteria?
Discovery doesn't fail your criteria, however I don't think most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language. Certainly doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Well, for me the intention matters; is the intention communication (and yes, art is communication as well - it communicates the artists feelings at the time)?
If the intention is to communicate how many moons have passed, why is tally marks not considered written language?
We talk about the language of mathematics, and no one bats an eye, but tally marks still fall into the category of language of mathematics.
I am seeing the stated criteria as a distinction without a difference: The intentional mark `5` signifying how many moons have passed is somehow different to the intentional mark `|||||`, but no one is explaining what the difference is.
I don't think the linguists would consider arabic numerals on their own to be a language either. The main distinction, as I understand it, is having something like a grammar, i.e. a set of consistent rules about how to arrange the symbols to have meaning beyond just the sum of the meaning of each individual symbol. So no matter how you mark down your count, it's not language until you have some consistent pattern of signifying that that means how many moons have passed, or how many people are in the local community, or something like that.
> most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language.
How about emojis?
> most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language.
> How about emojis?
Goo question; those are literally to communicate :-/
It's not impossible that there's something here, but I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists.
I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.
I would prefer to see pictures of these symbols, and their in-situ neighbors, and a corresponding symbol across a wide distance that's within at most 2-300 years.
We want to feel that language has commonalities, that people traveled long distances and times and kept some common bond. It might even make intuitive sense, if the people share cultural similarities. But it often results in linguists making motivated decisions without enough evidence, like happened with the "Altaic"[1] language family.
[0] https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/m... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_l...
"I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists." Speaking as a linguist... you're right, it doesn't convince me. Nearly all languages have more sounds (phonemes) than the symbols shown in most of those infographics--more consonants, even (many early writing systems only represented consonants). All languages have more distinct syllables than any of those symbol systems (many early writing systems were syllabic). And obviously all languages have far more words (or morphemes) than any of those systems.
What would be more convincing? A sequence of a few dozen symbols in some particular location, and likely to have been written at the same time (rather than centuries or millennia apart), by the same person (so if there were handprints, the handprints would be the same person's hand(s)), where the number of recognizable symbols is twenty or more. I don't say that would be all that would be needed to convince linguists, but it would be a start.
Can we say "language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one"? A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound, and taken at face value the separation on the map would seem to imply that any spoken language could have evolved dramatically out of sync with any physical representation. I can't think of any reason to think that - if you assume a phonetic interpretation - a symbol shared between North America and southern Africa would be pronounced at all similarly in both locations when the marks were made. The distances alone argue against a phonetic interpretation to me.
Do hobo signs count as a language? That seems intuitively much closer to what this might be. How much structure do you need?
"Can we say 'language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one'?" Of course: sign languages. But sign languages have even more "phonemes" than spoken languages do, so this doesn't help the hypothesis.
And yes, "A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound": that's what hieroglyphic writing systems were, more or less. Again, more distinct symbols, not fewer.
"Do hobo signs count as a language?" Depends on how you define "language". As most linguists would define language, though, the answer is no. All normal spoken or signed languages have oodles of structure (grammar). Pidgin languages probably do not, but that's just the first generation or so, after which they gain structure and are technically creoles. (Some creoles have the word "pidgin" in their names, like Tok Pisin of New Guinea, and Hawaiian Pidgin, but they're complex enough to justify the term "creole.")
Odd that you say “nearly all languages have”, which would include that other languages you yourself can think of, do not have “more sounds[…]symbols…”
The problem I have with “experts” when it comes to this kind of dogma challenging thing is that they are usually extremely biased and limited by that dogma.
Let me put it this way, if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language. Ironically, to me at least, the limited ands relatively consistent nature of the symbols itself actually qualifies it as language, not disqualifies it.
Two languages I can think of that have approximately the number of phonemes that some of those sign lists have are Hawai'ian (at least 13 phonemes, depending on how you analyze vowel length and diphthongs) and Central Rotokas (11 phonemes). But that low a number is extremely rare among languages.
"...if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language" Communication, yes. Language? Knowing nothing about Martians, I'd have to withhold judgement. On Earth, language is much more than just communication.
I’d also need to see statistics - without any selection bias introduced by what the researcher finds interesting.
There may be 30 or so “common” patterns that appear globally - that would be very interesting if the total pool of symbols was say 50 but much less so if there are thousands of different symbols.
You don't understand. The other 99,970 symbols are just random doodles. It's the 30 common ones that aren't.
There are instances in South America, North Africa, and Australia, where some prehistoric person took the foot of an animal such as a large bird or lizard, with feet that resemble human hands, and stenciled round it onto a wall. Is the repetition of this trope over wide distances just a freaky coincidence? Yes.
Well, there's probably something mimetic going on, like the idea of stenciling round your hand at all. "Neat! I'm gonna do that too! I'm gonna get my little brother to do it! And my chicken! And this leftover lizard foot!" Memes spread easily. Kilroy was here, nobody writes that one on walls any more, and hands were stenciled over thousands of years, but we have an evolving culture now.
> Kilroy was here, nobody writes that one on walls any more, and hands were stenciled over thousands of years, but we have an evolving culture now.
Not in the relevant sense. Nobody writes Kilroy was here anymore, but we continue to do hand outlines. That's not a practice that has changed over the last 50,000 years.
I think these cave drawings are a global written language, not a universal spoken language.
- Smushed oval is water, because it looks like a water drop from the side.
- Hand is a person or family or tribe.
- Hand surrounded by circle is what is around us, water around us, swim.
- Jagged line is danger. Having to dart back-and-forth to get away from a predator or rough sharp rocks.
- Small filled circles are rocks.
- Large circle is large body of water.
- Group of open circles is area that gets rain or is wet.
- Vertical lines are a penetrable forest.
- Crosshatch is an impenetrable area.
- Three lines up to point are a place to gather/sleep/have a fire.
- Four lines coming up is fire/dry brush to make fire.
- Horizontal line is a plain/flat area.
- U-shape is a significant valley or dip.
- Tree-branch looking thing means a place to get wood for fire.
- Snake symbol is snake/going around obstacles/not a direct path.
- Lines covered by line at top is a hut/shelter, because it's made with trees.
- The spiral is home/where to go/journey.
- The X is a rest spot or a place where things are put. People had to be on top of each other for warmth, and spears/tools may go in a pile.
- The rectangle with bent top is ocean, deep water, or pit with water.
This is retrofitting. It's not what these references mean.
These are entoptics. We've tested their neural sources for 40 years.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395
Google entoptics and look at the graphic array.
Tested what, exactly?
I suggest the symbols are morospiles. That's a term from Greek meaning "stupid blemish". This too can be tested: get a bunch of stupid people together to paint on a wall, see what marks they make, measure the degree of similarity to cave art, write a paper about it titled "Maybe They Were Stupid?". Repeat this a hundred times and you've got a field of study to cite authoritatively.
Matching occipital and retinal/purkinje patterns and mapped them to these at scale.
The human mind is so oriented towards pattern matching that we perceive patterns in random noise.
Your statement is a narrative illusion. Science is about pattern seeking and then correlating data about those patterns. They have zilch to do with one another.
> These are entopics
Without a time machine, that opinion is no more valid than people keeping a consistent mapping and storytelling language by drawing in the dirt. There is evidence on both sides.
For example, the picture of the entrance stone on this page uses spirals:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art
Not so. As these are isolated occurring form constants popping up outside of any possible diffusion, their universality prior to symbolic or pictographic coherences indicate an interim state between expression and symbol.
The rush to claim these are a language is unsupported and is quite suspicious of a retrofitting that's prone to pseudoscience.
I would read Paleoperformance and Paleopoetics for discussions about pre-literate, pre-symbolic cultures from the archeological evidence.
Imposing intent or causality onto these is a bit bizarre.
The spirals from Newgrange. Those are indeed claimed to "resemble phosphenes" in Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? which this person posted in another comment. They are neolithic, which is a very long way from paleolithic, not just in time but in development of ideas. The paper has another montage of images with the Gundestrup cauldron in it! That was made in the small hundreds AD. It's just a grab-bag of anything that looks shamanic to support the thesis "maybe they were tripping", about everybody everywhere throughout time, and yes, fair point, maybe they were tripping, it's worth bearing in mind. Also, maybe they were stupid. So what? Is this a solution to any problem?
The people who made the symbol once may have had a sense of meaning they wanted to communicate.
You sir is pissing all over it.
“ I think these cave drawings are a global written language”
Any particular evidence to back up that claim?
Your explanations sound arbitrary and about as likely as anything else.
I'm interested to know if the top left character in both Europe and North America actually looks like that. It's the radical for roof in Chinese. Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.
> Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.
Are you kidding? Two thousand years ago they would have looked like seal script.
That radical is known today as the 宝盖 ("cover of 宝"), so here's the character 宝 itself. The roof is prominently featured: https://img.zdic.net/zy/jinwen/32_F420.svg
( You can see other instances from the same period at http://zdic.net/zd/zx/jw/%E5%AE%9D )
Would you be able to recognize the radical? Would you be able to recognize the character?
You really need to add a heavy usage of the conditional in your descriptions.
There is no world in which any of those symbols can ever be known, except time travel - and even then there will be a communication problem.
[flagged]
A lot of these are so simple its not unbelievable to think that people simply came up with the same things as everyone else inna similar time without ever meeting. Im not seeing swastikas or equilateral triangles, just shapes that look to be simple representations of natural things perhaps.
I loved the infographic, although it's clearly overly simplistic it does suggest a sense of where there is no claimed extent of a symbol-type, which might in some cases support broad patterns of domains of exchange. It generates interest.
The real linguistic question is not whether the art had representational value and thus was a form of communication: this is known and clear, simply through the frequent nature of pictographic forms of recognizable elements of the environment.
Rather, it is more to what extent there was a systematization of the pictographs through phonetic or phonosyllabic use, and to what extent any such symbol repetition indicates a depth of shared culture across spatiotemporal divides. At what point does it count as 'writing'?
In general, there was clearly shared culture (technology meant that options were somewhat limited, and we have traced major changes such as the ingress of dingoes from Asia to Australia). What we are learning recently is the hitherto dismissed extent to which disparate branches of hominids survived and persisted in pockets across time, how we mixed with them and adopted their features. IMHO grand colonial theories of migration (often patriarchic/single-event/unidirectional) are falling away as novel evidence such as mtDNA shows far longer admixture and pluralistic bidirectional flows of culture, genes and technology.
Personally, having seen some ancient cave paintings near the northern Burmese and Vietnamese borders as well as in Australia and most recently in a book on Baja California, the similarities are striking, but this does not mean people teleported across the globe. It seems early peoples globally worked a broadly similar techno-social palette to leave marks across time, persisting their identity and expression in ways which probably marked social presence, status, ritual and interpretation. Stories became written and illustrated, but only in summary. Usually we cannot recover the actual content because all that is left are cues, other times modern anthropology preserved traditional interpretation. We often see presumed or literal figures, animals (spirits? gods? prey? food?), weapons, abstract markings, celestial bodies. Things that would be notable in such a society. 20th century anthropology has shelves of studies on this stuff. Here in Sydney, a city of 4+ million people, there are many aboriginal sites with engravings of people, emu, fish, dolphins, turtles, whales, kangaroos, reptiles, etc. Further north, even far inland, there exists rock art of early European ships sighted on the coast, suggesting use for record, story-telling, teaching.
Perhaps quite a bit more not impossible?
We only know of the symbol use (if they were symbols) that happened on media that lasted tens of millennia. If they even painted symbols on deeply underground cave walls, they likely had them on many less durable surfaces as well. There could have been a huge oral tradition augmented by drawn memorization aids on durable but not that durable media. That augmented oral tradition would then occasionally, every few dozen generations or so, due to some exceptional circumstances, spill over to the near-eternal medium of a cave wall.
> I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.
That infographic has bigger problems.
>> The similarities suggest the marks are more than just random scribbles
Except here are some of "the marks":
OK, a hand is a complex shape. It does suggest there's more going on than random scribbles. It suggests......
...that the people who drew a hand had hands.
Every single one of the other marks -- and the hand mark, too -- are things you could expect to find if you gave a small child some paper and crayons.
Worth noting that the hand “mark” is actually just a handprint—put hand on wall, spit pigment, done. To continue your comparison, it is essentially finger painting.
This is junk science. The illustration is absolutely bonkers: https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/02/28230224/cavedoodles.jp...
It's literally a bunch of graphic design output showing clean font glyphs! Needless to say, there is no, I mean zero evidence of any kind of symbology of the fidelity being shown. You'll get a petroglyph here or there, and that's it. Stretching those across whole continents and inferring "language" is just ridiculous.
This is, like mid-tier video game art.
Well yeah, the illustration on some website (that may or may not actually be in her book) isn't scholarly evidence, that's true. But you're not giving her enough credit here, by a long shot!
1. She's been doing this since 2011, her TED talk a decade ago racked up 2M views, and this book landed a positive review from the curator of the Smithsonian's "hall of human origins"; she's not some rando. Here's her (somewhat outdated?) Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QaDkX_UAAAAJ
2. The actual evidence here is supposedly "a unique database that holds more than 5,000 signs from almost 400 sites across Europe". It could still be misleading of course, but it's a lot more than just a website diagram.
3. You putting "language" in scare-quotes is completely unnecessary, as that's not what she's arguing at all. Rather, she's saying that these symbols should be treated as a milestone on the way to written language ("first indicators of our human ancestors capacity for symbolic meaning"), not full grammars in-and-of-themselves. Given that evolutionary linguistics is in a "pre-Gallilean" phase at best (to quote Chomsky), I'd say any well-cited contributions to the field should be welcomed! Maybe she's wrong, but in a way that leads us to what's right.
I came to the comments to be dubious as well, so I appreciate where you're coming from. But IMO "ridiculous" is going way too far...
> You putting "language" in scare-quotes is completely unnecessary, as that's not what she's arguing at all.
... then why is it in the headline?!
I'm not discounting the possibility that someone somewhere underneath this has done something approximating real science[1]. I'm saying that the link I clicked on, and the hypothesis it's pushing, is garbage. And I stand by that.
[1] Though "I made a database" might not rise to the level of clickworthy.
The uniform scale of the symbols is deceptive since the source drawings have substantially different sizes. The hand outline is hand sized, for instance.
TED sadly has a history of promoting pseudo-science, this one even got a standing ovation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwPoM7lGYHw
So, "Anne Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses" /s
Decided to lurk around and it seems it's a pretty long going thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
The illustration is of course just glyphs, but plenty of such symbols are found in e.g. paintings and stone and bone carvings. Not saying it's writing, but these kinds of symbols are not uncommon findings.
If you give me a stick and some sand these are some of the most common things I would be able to draw. I’m not sure that makes it a universal language. Every culture with a snake is going to have a squiggle line that looks like a snake. Everyone has a hand so they will make a hand print, etc. An X, a spiral, something that looks like a branch.
You had to bring Elon into this..
Yeah, but for every single instance of every single one of those glyphs, someone needs to publish a paper substantiating similarity to whatever that archetype is. You can't just put up a pretty font diagram and announce "They use the hand symbol here".
This is the same thing as all those stories about the Impossible Black Hole That Should Not Be There illustrated with something the graphics department threw together in photoshop.
Such work e.g. here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00704-x
hatching and crosses are used even today on tools to make them easier to grip. We'd expect them on smooth and hard tools made of bone or rock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knurling
These patterns are found in paintings too.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that Neanderthals were the intellectual equals of humans.
For anybody into prehistoric abstract symbols who hasn't encountered this, "The Signs of All Times 1988" [1] is a super interesting study. Also very readable for the majority of us who are not in the field. Pairs nicely with Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams [2] and any mid-tier Cabernet.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
And just my two cents as an under-qualified former art history teacher...
It's fascinating and totally valid to try to analyze these symbols as proto-linguistic, but it can be even more interesting to imagine the cognitive roll these kinda of abstract symbols might have played outside the scope of language as we understand it.
Trying to imaging the structure of the mind and experiencing reality with a complete absence of language can be immensely mind-expanding, even just as a thought experiment. At least it was for me.
As we were taught in entoptic studies, these are not elements of a proto language, they are externalizations of the occipital/retinal that both reference the brain and reference space - together.
They are the basis for a spatial language of topological parts that have yet to be realized but does integrate with the plastic arts. ie are these the source of pictograms as language? Probably not. Is there are continuity with Kurgan or Chinese ideograms? We can't find them. Is there a continuity between counting tokens and alphabets? Yes, there's a stronger case for that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23890291/
Kids will independently re-invent most of these in their first few years of life. Circle? Five circles? Hand outline? One line? Perpendicular lines? Multiple perpendicular lines? Spiral? Being passed down thousands of years is not the best explanation for them being found everywhere.
I'm not saying these symbols qualify as a language, but this argument against it does not hold up.
There is no such thing as a child developing "independently" in the sense that you are using it here, and anyone who would try would be rightfully sued for child abuse in most countries.
Even a child with prelingual deafness who is denied Sign language and access to Deaf culture (and I recommend looking up what terrible impact that has on such a child's development and quality of life), is still surrounded by human symbols from the day they open their eyes.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelingual_deafness
Granted, it's not the best explanation. But stone age people did pass things down thousands of years.
For instance, the Alta rock carvings site was used for about 5000 years. They added new ones for some 200 generations. They managed to avoid wiping out the older markings, they managed to avoid the entire place being covered with scribbles. They definitively preferred this site, not any random suitable site, for their petroglyph narrative, whatever it meant. If place-bound cultural continuity can be so strong, who's to say something like it can't have survived journeys too?
(But yes, petroglyphs clearly aren't a language as we know it)
Reminds me of Prometheus (2012 Alien prequel) 17 minutes and 50 seconds in.
That symbol that looks like an arrow pointing up with three lines coming out of the point has been seen on three different UFO crafts, including in the infamous Socorro incident investigated by Project Blue Book: https://labyrinths.xyz/posts/the-socorro-insignia-and-indus-...
Yes that was my first thought too.
One of my favourite kooks is an artist named Stanislaw Szukalski[0]. Although he had some heinously racist ideas (yeti inbreeding with humans), his art skills are unmatched, and his critical analysis of ancient art led him to develop the concept of the "Protong", the 'mother tongue of all humanity', which - he claims - can be observed in the style and means of much ancient art. His theory was that, before The Cataclysm™, humanity was united across the globe and spoke the same language, and after the fall of that ancient civilization, the survivors attempted to warn the future by encoding messages in their art.
Although he inhabits the lunatic fringe, I still find the concept of Protong highly interesting, and now that more settled minds are looking at the possibility of a global language, I do have to wonder just how much he got right in terms of identifying the language, itself, in ancient art. I also wonder whether modern researchers could gain anything from his investigation, using more appropriate techniques to glean fact from fiction.
Anyone else know of Szukalski, and can weigh in on this? I confess that my interest is pretty glib (because the yeti thing is repugnant), but I can't help feeling, deep down inside, that maybe the Protong idea has some legs ..
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Szukalski
"Beginning in 1940, Szukalski devoted most of his time to examining the mysteries of prehistoric ancient history of mankind, the formation and shaping of languages, faiths, customs, arts, and migration of peoples. He tried to unravel the origin of geographical names, gods, and symbols that have survived in various forms in various cultures. Through his research in these subjects, Szukalski claimed to have discovered Polish origins for various ancient places and people, in a language called Protong."
Languages develop too quickly to be traced that far. Even if there was a protolanguage (there could have been one in Africa I guess) by the time continents were explored, the languages would have no relation to any "ur-language".
True, mostly.
The point with Protong, however, is that there was a globally-spanning civilization which did not have the latency we commonly associate with early human development. The language was supposedly spoken globally by a world-spanning human civilization which was destroyed by the cataclysm, requiring us all to re-develop ourselves.
Like I said, Szukalski was a kook. But contrasting his findings with more scientifically appropriate methods, is certainly of great interest to those of us following along...
To be fair, in the video TED talk by Genevieve von Petzinger, she does not claim these are "writing", instead calling the symbols "graphic communication". So not a language, much less writing, but still conveying a shared meaning between the sender (writer) and the recipient (observer). She does admit speculating these symbols could be clan or family identifiers, but does not attempt to ascribe any meaning beyond that.
What's up with that NES gamepad symbol in Europe?
Well, Mario is Italian, right?
I am amazed that the - symbol appears to have been invented over and over!
I wonder, could writing appear because of need for accounting? For example, the ruler of a group of tribes needs to know which village paid the tribute, how much they owe, how much warriors they can provide and so on.
It's been suggested that cuneiform was driven by exactly that.
Numbers may be older than letters.
With Sumerian cuneiform, some of the earliest examples appear to be inventories and maybe contracts and exchange records. For example this [1] appears to be a food ration token of some kind: Mouth bowl barley 4.
That's about 3100 BC or so. Five hundred years or so later, in developed cuneiform, those symbols still exist. By then they are usually abstracted into unrecognizable wedge shapes and lines. And by then they are definitely words, which had a reading aloud in Sumerian.
But back in 3100 BC, it's an open question whether they were thinking of the symbols that way.
There is an intermediate stage. One of the things you might want to account for is people. And their professions. [2] Again it is unclear if these are words. Eye city. (Guard?) King bull. (Chief herdsman?) What appears to be three tiers of gardener. Getting sophisticated. Within two centuries of that, we start to see the use of the pictograms to represent other values phonetically. A head is read as SAG. So if you want to write a name that has a syllable including SA or SAG you use the head symbol. And this is one of the key steps toward writing. But it is used sparingly at first. Names. Place names. Nouns for which there is no pictogram.
That is to say, more than 90% of the tablets continue to be beer receipts and the like. Around the same time, the kings and priests start to account and take inventory of their ancestors and battles as well. The language was probably Sumerian but there's almost no evidence of the Sumerian language itself in the writing yet. So few words written non-pictographically, no case markers or inflections or adpositions written yet. About 2600 BC the Sumerians start writing with grammatical markers, and the set of pictograms has developed into a system that can represent most of the sounds of Sumerian. And they start writing epic poetry and letters of complaint about their copper shipments being late.
I got a bit sidetracked sorry! My point is that the base-60 numerical system is fully developed at the earliest stage. It is used with the early pictograms.
Something similar may be true for the other meso- civilization in Mesoamerica. There's a fragment of an Olmec or Epi-Olmec stele with a date in the Long Count that, by Maya reckoning, would be in 36 BC. This is hundreds of years before the earliest examples of what is certainly writing, with the Maya. Things are very fragmentary so there is little certainty. But it seems possible Mesoamerican civilizations were recording absolute dates with their calendars, hundreds of years before they developed the ability to write arbitrary text.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jemdet_Nasr_tablet_A...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_...
Really interesting - thanks for taking the time to comment.
Maybe the context where in the cave the symbol has been found could indicate what it meant. Furthermore symbols could be related to the surroundings of the cave to give future cave dwellers information about the area.
This feels slight of hand - like redefining what a written language is in order to claim discovery of a new record.
There were older ways of communication, but to be a writing system it needs symbolise a spoken language.
It says something about copper… and ingots. An impugning of someone’s character seems to be involved.
If 40,000 years old, you're probably talking more about rock.
Ancient emojis.
More like WiFi war-driving symbols
Let's ignore the headline itself for a moment and try to take the rest of the article at face value.
The idea that is being plainly communicated here is that there's a single system of symbols that is so well-understood that it gets passed along to human populations in Siberia that then cross the Bering strait as well as the isthmus of Panama, and these populations over this period maintain this system with such fidelity that they're recognizable as descending from the SAME system of symbols that entirely separate populations in Europe and Southern Africa are also using.
I don't think an alternative intepretation is reasonable to take away from the "Consistent doodles" infographic or the phrasing like "early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents".
This is either earth-shaking news that demands an entirely new understanding of human heritage, or it's very obvious pseudo-science.
The article blurs the distinction between general symbolic representation and writing, which is specifically the symbolic representation of language. Thus this statement is self-contradictory: "[...] those prehistoric forms of writing, which include the earliest known hashtag marks, consisted of symbols nearly as universal as emoji." If the symbols were universal representations of concepts, then they were not representations of language, because different languages represent concepts in different ways. (Unless one supposes that at this time 40k years ago, only one language existed, which is unlikely.) The reference to hashtags also does not inspire confidence.
It's not new or surprising that there are cave drawings and petroglyphs that are much older than the oldest writing, nor that such art is symbolic in some sense. It would be surprising if this art was writing, but this article gives no indication of that.
The nearest thing seems to be the claim that "the signs and the animals were meant to convey ideas just as a written language does", which is linked to an article by Miyagawa et al. ( https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... ).
I looked at that article. To call it speculative might be an understatement (although the authors are clear that what they are doing is speculating). It includes reasoning like this:
> Waller (2002) points out that the pictures often cluster in areas with enhanced acoustic properties. For instance, in the deep caves of Font-de-Gaume and Lascaux, pictures of hoofed animals such as bulls, bison, and deer appear in chambers in which the echoes, resonances, and reverberation created percussive sounds that resemble hoof beats7, as illustrated in Figure 2. In contrast to this, in chambers that are acoustically quiet, one finds pictures of felines (Waller, 1993a) or simple dots and handprints (Hoffman, 2014).
> Cave art, as analyzed by archeoacoustics, shows a flow of information from one modality to another: auditory to visual. The auditory modality is triggered by external input—thunder, rock tapping, music— and the auditory representation is mentally transformed into external, visual representation. This is a pure form of externalized symbolic thinking where information from one modality is transformed into representation in another modality. We speculate that this activity of information transfer across modalities allowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking to their conspecifics, as well as their ability to process acoustic and visual input as symbolic (i.e., to associate acoustic and visual stimuli to a given mental representation).
So. . . because cave paintings are found in places where sounds resonate, they helped us communicate symbolically. Uh-huh.
Later they list "striking similarities" between cave art and human language, including as separate points that they "are used for communication", that they "express actions, states, objects, and modification", and that they "externalize internal mental states". Ah yes, as opposed to all those other communication mechanisms which somehow communicate without externalizing internal mental states, and without expressing actions, objects, etc.
The article also heavily cites Chomsky at his most nonsensical (e.g., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497... ), where he speculates wildly about the evolution of language while clinging to tenets which are at best implausible from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., "the optimal conclusion about the nature of language would be that its basic principles are extremely simple"). And that's to say nothing of his upside-down view of language in which communication is regarded as secondary to its function as a "system of thought".
Again, to be fair, the Miyagawa article is up-front about being speculative. But even so, its speculation seems rather extreme and I don't see any actual data supporting the hypothesis that cave art is writing rather than just some form of symbolic representation.
> clinging to tenets which are at best implausible from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., "the optimal conclusion about the nature of language would be that its basic principles are extremely simple").
Why do you say that?
These aren't symbolic, they're literal neural and retinal references externalized.
This is one of the most commonly understood subfields in the Paleolithic
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomenon
I clicked and read. This is bonkers wrong. They're definitely not that.
Are you pretending to know? This is an entire field of study, Paleolithic cave art references and phosphene phenomena, there's hundreds of papers about this. We can verify the scales on cave walls and the distance to optic, literally where someone could stand to reexperience the entoptic.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287487106_Does_the_...
It is true that this is a hypothesis that has been made, but it's a reach to say that "we know that's what these are".
It's not simply hypothesis, it's already at the theoretic stage, empirical evidence has been gathered from two fields. Any scientist knows that there are never conclusions, there are only regularities pointing to correlations within limits. These limits have been reached by matching scales.
Ah, so that's where the otherwise inexplicable symbol for a washing machine spin cycle comes from.
Ig you want to get _really_ conspiracy-theory-ish... doesn't that six star symbol look like the Pleiades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_in_folklore_and_liter... (Some have noted that the Pleiades has suspiciously similar myths associated with them, across the world.)
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These aren't a "language" they're called entoptics or phosphenes. Calling this a language is like the other posts here, is pseudoscience.
Entoptics are actual neural gradient patterns of the retina and occipital externalized, from altered states, light-deprivation, trances even extreme expression.
Entoptics are well enough researched (Lewis-Williams, Entoptics: The Signs of All Times) that any New Scientist writer should have at least mentioned this.
we've had a good millennium for humans
40,000 years is 40 chances at other good milleniums occurring
Where cultures weren't using metals as the primary basis of infrastructure, there wouldn't be much evidence remaining of those cultures. Add in glaciers and everything is ground up, except in caves.
Or 300 chances! First homo sapiens was born around 300k years ago, and their culture rose and declined many times in many places. Around 40k years ago it did start to "monotonically accumulate" though.
See e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3049097/
We’re so young. 40 millennium is honestly nothing on universal timescales.
But it is on civilizational timescales, that’s the point
Ensuring sentience survives heat death of the universe would be a marvelously unifying goal.
The reason there are variations of the same-similar shapes all over the world is that different peoples in diverse locations saw the same “light shows” in the sky from various vantage points.
This riddle was solved 20+ years ago by Dr. Peratt and his collaborators, but I guess many more years will pass before his work on the subject is widely accepted or someone else with the “right credentials” in the social sciences rediscovers the same explanation and has better luck than a physicist who became wonderfully obsessed with petroglyphs.
Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity (2003)
https://archive.org/details/anthony-peratt-characteristics-f...
Part II of Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High Current Z Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity: Directionality And Source (2007)
https://archive.org/details/characteristics-for-the-occurren...
That paper is pretty... out there, sorry. There's a reason people look for credentials -- to screen out work like this!
1. The random insinuation halfway through that ancient humans had secret advanced civilizations seems completely uncalled-for, and would put any discerning reviewer on edge. Which is I guess why this is in a plasma science journal and not an anthropology one?
2. AFAIK, the whole thing only works if A) aliens, B) Sol put off 10-100 times more radiation than it does today, or C) "another source of plasma were to enter the solar system" (???).
3. Figure 30 especially cracks me up, where he argues that a figure with hands and genitals isn't a human, but rather a geometric shape. IDK... seems like a reach. Ditto for explaining spirals as recordings of the sky rather than a basic shape found throughout nature right here on earth.
> The random insinuation halfway through that ancient humans had secret advanced civilizations seems completely uncalled-for, and would put any discerning reviewer on edge.
Are you referring to Peratt’s quoting Mallory? That section of the paper is simply a review of historical work on petroglyphs and insinuates nothing at all. Context is a thing.
> AFAIK, the whole thing only works if A) aliens, B) Sol put off 10-100 times more radiation than it does today
No aliens required and such are not entertained in these papers.
Also, it's not about "more radiation" but an increase in "charged particle outflow" (flux).
> Figure 30…
Anthropomorphization was a human tendency long before someone invented terminology to describe it.
skims the articles quickly
Um, no.
Archaeoastronomy is a field that is borderline fringe science, in large part because it is really easy to overinterpret the data and find spurious correlations because there's just so many variables. To be taken seriously, you have to produce a lot of ancillary data to buttress the interpretation, for example showing that the claimed astronomical features have relevant cultural significance and hence would have reason to be specifically marked.
These papers aren't doing that. They're saying "hey, you can interpret pictograms as features of aurora," which is exactly the kind of argument you would make if you wanted to guarantee ostracization from the community. There's not an attempt to demonstrate a common source, there's not an attempt to analyze a complete context of petroglyphs (as opposed to individual ones) to demonstrate a coherent, single interpretation of a single event. Nope, it's just "some of these common petroglyphs look kind of like aurora features."
Yep, clearly you didn’t read the papers. Shapes that appear spontaneously in laboratory plasma are carefully compared with shapes made/drawn by humans all over the world at various times and locations in the distant past.
“Directionality and source” is literally the sub/title of the second paper and it explores what theory and evidence-data suggest.
Although the second paper had the term “archaeoastronomy” (only) in its index terms, it is confusing (at best) to categorize it that way as the phenomena manifested in Earth’s atmosphere not in outer space among the planets and stars.
I skimmed the papers, because I have not the time to read them in detail.
But let me tell you this: even as a non-expert, comparing the pictures of the claimed phenomenon with various pictures of petroglyphs it's pretty clear that the correlation is extremely loose. And there's nothing in the text I skimmed to address some of this misses.
Maybe you can tell me though. For the images that most identify as depictions of humans that the paper instead identifies as a toroidal flux tube around a plasma column because of the presence of two round dots: how does the presence of many similar human-like figures without those two dots match the same phenomenon?
To put it in really frank terms: this field is problematic in general because spurious correlation is really common. So any paper needs to start by demonstrating not merely correlation but something that makes it seem actually causative, some other factor to make me believe that it might be true. Without that link, Occam's Razor says it's just another thing on the heap of spurious correlations.
> how does the presence of many similar human-like figures without those two dots match the same phenomenon
Toroidal instability and shape-evolution is given considerable attention in the paper. The toroids fold and warp and what the human eye perceives will depend on the viewing angle. If you're looking at the toroid edge-on you get the "dot" effect, cf. Figure 31 in the first paper. The "double-dot" squatter petroglyphs are rarer, as that paper points out.