14 ms·

Londoner solves 20k-year Ice Age drawings mystery

140 points by cmsefton 4y ago

briandon 4y ago
I think that this is the paper mentioned in the linked article: An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog... The lead author is Bennett Bacon, corresponding to the "Ben Bacon" named in the BBC piece.
- ahub 4y ago
  That seem to be it. They talk about compiling a database of cave art. I'd love to access that !
  - b112 4y ago
    Good sir! I have setup a nice collection for you, please visit my NFT page blah blah, heh. Can you imagine, scribbling on a cave wall, now your art is a NFT. Seem surreal, yet I bet someone is working on an NFT of that now.
- gibolt 4y ago
  The paper has a selection of images that convey the point much better than the article
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Looking at these pictures my first thought was oh each line/dot must be like a full moon. But apparently it’s 1 line for each day? Edit: this is interesting. Gonna bookmark to read in full later.
- bjackman 4y ago
  Thanks! Much more interesting. Some details of the paper's claims that I enjoyed: - the system was stable over (i.e. their dataset covers) thousands of years - it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected. - they hypothesise a lunar calendar that begins with spring. It just kinda fizzles out during winter when there are no particularly interesting "dates". hus it isn't disturbed by the lack of synchronization between lunar and solar cycles.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    >- it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected. The paper actually discusses this in detail. The difference between this and prior lunar proposals is that they hypothesize: 1) what is being counted in lunar months 2) when the system is counting from 3) it supports this with a large amount of contemporary data on animal behavior. If correct, this is an amazing demonstration of data transfer. It decodes basically 850 sets of observational animal behavior data recorded 30,000 on animal behavior years ago. It is like finding the notebooks of ancient scientists for an entire region.
    - bjackman 4y ago
      Oh right, I didn't pick up that those were the things that were unique. But yeah that makes sense!
- hoseja 4y ago
  Hm, I see no discussion about left-to-right vs right-to-left positioning of the ordinal Y in the (horizontal) sequences. Is left-to-right taken for granted?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Doesn't look like it. if you have a hypothesis, write it up and publish it
  - yodon 4y ago
    Hopefully someone else can find more context in the paper on left-to-right vs right-to-left sequencing (or animal-facing-direction or towards-the-head(?)-of-the-animal or ? sequencing). The most relevant quote in the paper I could find is >Figure 4 presents the position of <Y> in sequences, by analytical taxa. To determine the position of <Y>, we assumed that sequences were oriented in the same way as their associated animal depictions, i.e. with the animal the right way up. But I don't see how to get a directionality from that quote.
ddalex 4y ago
What man would need to track the 28-days cycle of the moon?!? The first astronomers and calendarians were women....
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Not that you are necessarily wrong but... A hunter who wants to go out at night and needs to know when it will be light/dark. Ditto someone planning/expecting an attack on/by a neighbouring tribe. Or really anyone with some free time and interest (not uncommon)...
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    Tracking breeding cycles is more likely about sustainability. This might have been the precursor to cattle farming.
- ErikCorry 4y ago
  Once you start counting time in lunar months it's an obvious move to divide the month in two halves, and then to do that again, and divide it into four. I wonder how old the concept of a week actually is.
  - thechao 4y ago
    The 7 day week is a fairly modern convention; I believe popularized by the Christianization of Europe. The classic Roman "week" is 8 days. The Mayans (and most of mesoamerica) used a pair of interlocking 13 & 20 day "weeks". The Chinese used a 9 or 10 day "week" (xún).
    - irrational 4y ago
      Genesis has a seven day week and was written down 1000+ years before Christianity came into existence. But the Israelites probably got it from their Mesopotamian neighbors who had a 7 day week.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
mseepgood 4y ago
The Lascaux Caves have been known for 80 years. Wouldn't that be the first and most obvious hypothesis to test? Why only now?
- macleginn 4y ago
  Probably because people mostly thought/talked about these images as aesthetic expression (or at least as signs of symbolic/notional thinking), not as something practical.
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  It is a well known fact that only $current_year humans are intelligent. All previous generations are violent and stupid. They are too busy clubbing themselves to even bother with the concept of time passing.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    Don’t forget that if you see something in the archeological record that you can’t comprehend, there is always a reasonable explanation: it’s ritualistic woo-woo. (There should be a “Razor” for this)
karol 4y ago
Before I invest into reading the paper - does it say why precisely the hunters wanted to record the breeding cycles? Is this NOT to target the animals at that time or is it because they thought they would be easier prey?
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  > it seems far more likely that information pertinent to predicting their migratory movements and periods of aggregation, i.e. mating and birthing when they are predicably located in some number and relatively vulnerable, would be of greatest importance for survival That's more or less the only relevant statement I found, but I didn't read the paper start to finish.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  The latter. There was such abundance at the time that conservation probably never crossed a single mind.
zozbot234 4y ago
So the humans of late Pleistocene were behaviorally modern and made use of non-trivial codes for recording information over time. Graham Hancock is proven correct once again.
- robbiep 4y ago
  He’s swung pretty hard for the fences on some big claims and that was far from one of the controversial ones
- thechao 4y ago
  I can't tell if you're serious? I'll take your comment at face-value: Graham Hancock is not a trustworthy source. His "inspiration" is based on thoroughly discredited, white supremacist garbage. The fundamental thesis of his work is that: (1) white people have had civilization for (tens?) of thousands of years; and, (2) nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > ... nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything. Except that, e.g. the Dogon civilization is also many thousands of years old and had complex astronomical knowledge about extra-solar bodies which rivals that of modern times. There's nothing whatsoever about Graham Hancock's working hypotheses that's inherently exclusive to Europeans.
    - thechao 4y ago
      No they didn’t. The Dogon BS was debunked years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people#Astronomical_beliefs
  - permo-w 4y ago
    Graham Hancock's tone bothers me. it's far too much of "these traitorous archaeologists don't want you to know". but I've never seen any hint of white supremacy, or even remotely white-focused ideology. he seems to look for older civilisations pretty indiscriminately around the world. I'd say, if anything, he just likes a nice holiday
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
The last picture shows 14 dots - not any lunar cycle I know of. I have to wonder, with a small sample what's the odds the dots and the reproductive cycle is just a coincidence?
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  Are the dots for days and it’s half a moon? That would be ovulation time for a human. I can’t make out what the drawing is.
  - mhuffman 4y ago
    hmmm... my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that ovulation in ancient times was much less regular due to diet.
    - ljf 4y ago
      I think hunter gatherers had a far more regular diet than early farmers. By the middle ages in Britain most peasants were near starvation most of the year, but hunter gatherers avoided famine as they had a wide variety of food sources available. I don't have a source of this though!
    - Pigalowda 4y ago
      For women who have low body fat it will be more irregular because of insufficient estrin provided by adipose tissue. A woman with poor diet and low body fat would be irregular. Spring season is a time of abundance and fertility for plants and animals so I imagine Hunter gatherer societies had a better diet during spring and therefore women met body fat requirements for regular menstrual cycle and ovulation. Maybe the 4 linear marks in the cave painting are for the 4 months after winter solstice and 14 dots are for days to ovulation after menses?
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Humans are literally the same now as they were then. They had calendars and they had memes and they had steve (nobody liked steve) The only difference is that nobody has invented a way to live densely and share knowledge effectively enough to advance.
- rnk 4y ago
  Yeah, we are not smarter than the folks that lived way before. We have way better nutrition, education, we live longer, we know about washing our hands before we eat. We must have way worse concentration on things, constantly distracted by (.. just a moment, got a text about the stock market), distracted by things, but they should have on the whole had the same capabilities as us. Nutrition and longer lifespan serve us well but it's really the knowledge built up over the millennia. Imagine those people in the late 1800s to early 1900s who figured out the elements, then eventually got to neutrons and protons, electrons. Anyway, that person who lived 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, I think if you took their baby and put them in a modern family they'd probably be indistinguishable from a current baby (maybe some impact of nutritional deficiency from the parents?). They should have been able to ruminate about the world and develop ideas and make stupid farting noises just like us.
jpivarski 4y ago
It would be exciting if this is true. I just can't get past the statistical analysis. Has anyone else noticed that the fit functions in Figures 3, 4, and 5 of https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog... go right through the _centers_ of most of the histogram bins? It's pretty clearly a binned fit and the fit function is just picking a few bins to overfit to while ignoring the other bins. With so little data, it would be more robust to do a simple mean or median, rather than this misleading fit. Later, it looks like they're inferring p-values from the fitted parameters, which aren't going to mean very much. Maybe the ultimate conclusions of this study are correct anyway. It just bothers me that the data analysis isn't justifiable as-is.

140 points by cmsefton 4y ago

I think that this is the paper mentioned in the linked article: An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog... The lead author is Bennett Bacon, corresponding to the "Ben Bacon" named in the BBC piece.

ahub 4y ago
That seem to be it. They talk about compiling a database of cave art. I'd love to access that !
- b112 4y ago
  Good sir! I have setup a nice collection for you, please visit my NFT page blah blah, heh. Can you imagine, scribbling on a cave wall, now your art is a NFT. Seem surreal, yet I bet someone is working on an NFT of that now.
gibolt 4y ago
The paper has a selection of images that convey the point much better than the article
philliphaydon 4y ago
Looking at these pictures my first thought was oh each line/dot must be like a full moon. But apparently it’s 1 line for each day? Edit: this is interesting. Gonna bookmark to read in full later.
bjackman 4y ago
Thanks! Much more interesting. Some details of the paper's claims that I enjoyed: - the system was stable over (i.e. their dataset covers) thousands of years - it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected. - they hypothesise a lunar calendar that begins with spring. It just kinda fizzles out during winter when there are no particularly interesting "dates". hus it isn't disturbed by the lack of synchronization between lunar and solar cycles.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  >- it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected. The paper actually discusses this in detail. The difference between this and prior lunar proposals is that they hypothesize: 1) what is being counted in lunar months 2) when the system is counting from 3) it supports this with a large amount of contemporary data on animal behavior. If correct, this is an amazing demonstration of data transfer. It decodes basically 850 sets of observational animal behavior data recorded 30,000 on animal behavior years ago. It is like finding the notebooks of ancient scientists for an entire region.
  - bjackman 4y ago
    Oh right, I didn't pick up that those were the things that were unique. But yeah that makes sense!
hoseja 4y ago
Hm, I see no discussion about left-to-right vs right-to-left positioning of the ordinal Y in the (horizontal) sequences. Is left-to-right taken for granted?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Doesn't look like it. if you have a hypothesis, write it up and publish it
- yodon 4y ago
  Hopefully someone else can find more context in the paper on left-to-right vs right-to-left sequencing (or animal-facing-direction or towards-the-head(?)-of-the-animal or ? sequencing). The most relevant quote in the paper I could find is >Figure 4 presents the position of <Y> in sequences, by analytical taxa. To determine the position of <Y>, we assumed that sequences were oriented in the same way as their associated animal depictions, i.e. with the animal the right way up. But I don't see how to get a directionality from that quote.

ddalex 4y ago

What man would need to track the 28-days cycle of the moon?!? The first astronomers and calendarians were women....

LatteLazy 4y ago
Not that you are necessarily wrong but... A hunter who wants to go out at night and needs to know when it will be light/dark. Ditto someone planning/expecting an attack on/by a neighbouring tribe. Or really anyone with some free time and interest (not uncommon)...
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Tracking breeding cycles is more likely about sustainability. This might have been the precursor to cattle farming.
ErikCorry 4y ago
Once you start counting time in lunar months it's an obvious move to divide the month in two halves, and then to do that again, and divide it into four. I wonder how old the concept of a week actually is.
- thechao 4y ago
  The 7 day week is a fairly modern convention; I believe popularized by the Christianization of Europe. The classic Roman "week" is 8 days. The Mayans (and most of mesoamerica) used a pair of interlocking 13 & 20 day "weeks". The Chinese used a 9 or 10 day "week" (xún).
  - irrational 4y ago
    Genesis has a seven day week and was written down 1000+ years before Christianity came into existence. But the Israelites probably got it from their Mesopotamian neighbors who had a 7 day week.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

mseepgood 4y ago

The Lascaux Caves have been known for 80 years. Wouldn't that be the first and most obvious hypothesis to test? Why only now?

macleginn 4y ago
Probably because people mostly thought/talked about these images as aesthetic expression (or at least as signs of symbolic/notional thinking), not as something practical.
gherkinnn 4y ago
It is a well known fact that only $current_year humans are intelligent. All previous generations are violent and stupid. They are too busy clubbing themselves to even bother with the concept of time passing.
- klabb3 4y ago
  Don’t forget that if you see something in the archeological record that you can’t comprehend, there is always a reasonable explanation: it’s ritualistic woo-woo. (There should be a “Razor” for this)

karol 4y ago

Before I invest into reading the paper - does it say why precisely the hunters wanted to record the breeding cycles? Is this NOT to target the animals at that time or is it because they thought they would be easier prey?

MauranKilom 4y ago
> it seems far more likely that information pertinent to predicting their migratory movements and periods of aggregation, i.e. mating and birthing when they are predicably located in some number and relatively vulnerable, would be of greatest importance for survival That's more or less the only relevant statement I found, but I didn't read the paper start to finish.
madaxe_again 4y ago
The latter. There was such abundance at the time that conservation probably never crossed a single mind.

zozbot234 4y ago

So the humans of late Pleistocene were behaviorally modern and made use of non-trivial codes for recording information over time. Graham Hancock is proven correct once again.

robbiep 4y ago
He’s swung pretty hard for the fences on some big claims and that was far from one of the controversial ones
thechao 4y ago
I can't tell if you're serious? I'll take your comment at face-value: Graham Hancock is not a trustworthy source. His "inspiration" is based on thoroughly discredited, white supremacist garbage. The fundamental thesis of his work is that: (1) white people have had civilization for (tens?) of thousands of years; and, (2) nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > ... nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything. Except that, e.g. the Dogon civilization is also many thousands of years old and had complex astronomical knowledge about extra-solar bodies which rivals that of modern times. There's nothing whatsoever about Graham Hancock's working hypotheses that's inherently exclusive to Europeans.
  - thechao 4y ago
    No they didn’t. The Dogon BS was debunked years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people#Astronomical_beliefs
- permo-w 4y ago
  Graham Hancock's tone bothers me. it's far too much of "these traitorous archaeologists don't want you to know". but I've never seen any hint of white supremacy, or even remotely white-focused ideology. he seems to look for older civilisations pretty indiscriminately around the world. I'd say, if anything, he just likes a nice holiday

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

The last picture shows 14 dots - not any lunar cycle I know of. I have to wonder, with a small sample what's the odds the dots and the reproductive cycle is just a coincidence?

Pigalowda 4y ago
Are the dots for days and it’s half a moon? That would be ovulation time for a human. I can’t make out what the drawing is.
- mhuffman 4y ago
  hmmm... my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that ovulation in ancient times was much less regular due to diet.
  - ljf 4y ago
    I think hunter gatherers had a far more regular diet than early farmers. By the middle ages in Britain most peasants were near starvation most of the year, but hunter gatherers avoided famine as they had a wide variety of food sources available. I don't have a source of this though!
  - Pigalowda 4y ago
    For women who have low body fat it will be more irregular because of insufficient estrin provided by adipose tissue. A woman with poor diet and low body fat would be irregular. Spring season is a time of abundance and fertility for plants and animals so I imagine Hunter gatherer societies had a better diet during spring and therefore women met body fat requirements for regular menstrual cycle and ovulation. Maybe the 4 linear marks in the cave painting are for the 4 months after winter solstice and 14 dots are for days to ovulation after menses?

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Humans are literally the same now as they were then. They had calendars and they had memes and they had steve (nobody liked steve) The only difference is that nobody has invented a way to live densely and share knowledge effectively enough to advance.

rnk 4y ago
Yeah, we are not smarter than the folks that lived way before. We have way better nutrition, education, we live longer, we know about washing our hands before we eat. We must have way worse concentration on things, constantly distracted by (.. just a moment, got a text about the stock market), distracted by things, but they should have on the whole had the same capabilities as us. Nutrition and longer lifespan serve us well but it's really the knowledge built up over the millennia. Imagine those people in the late 1800s to early 1900s who figured out the elements, then eventually got to neutrons and protons, electrons. Anyway, that person who lived 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, I think if you took their baby and put them in a modern family they'd probably be indistinguishable from a current baby (maybe some impact of nutritional deficiency from the parents?). They should have been able to ruminate about the world and develop ideas and make stupid farting noises just like us.

jpivarski 4y ago

It would be exciting if this is true. I just can't get past the statistical analysis. Has anyone else noticed that the fit functions in Figures 3, 4, and 5 of https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog... go right through the _centers_ of most of the histogram bins? It's pretty clearly a binned fit and the fit function is just picking a few bins to overfit to while ignoring the other bins. With so little data, it would be more robust to do a simple mean or median, rather than this misleading fit. Later, it looks like they're inferring p-values from the fitted parameters, which aren't going to mean very much. Maybe the ultimate conclusions of this study are correct anyway. It just bothers me that the data analysis isn't justifiable as-is.