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40k-Year-Old Symbols in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

189 points by mdp2021 1y ago

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
Reminds me of Prometheus (2012 Alien prequel) 17 minutes and 50 seconds in.
- andy99 1y ago
  Yes that was my first thought too.
- an0malous 1y ago
  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-valley-script https://labyrinths.xyz/posts/the-socorro-insignia-and-indus-...
  - jibal 1y ago
    There are no "UFO craft".
yieldcrv 1y ago
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.
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  We’re so young. 40 millennium is honestly nothing on universal timescales.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Ensuring sentience survives heat death of the universe would be a marvelously unifying goal.
  - an0malous 1y ago
    But it is on civilizational timescales, that’s the point
- jampekka 1y ago
  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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3049097/
txru 1y ago
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/mg30990701.jpg https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/m... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_lexical_and_typological_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_l...
- derriz 1y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    You don't understand. The other 99,970 symbols are just random doodles. It's the 30 common ones that aren't.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      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.
ajross 1y ago
This is junk science. The illustration is absolutely bonkers: https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/02/28230224/cavedoodles.jpg 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.
- jonny_eh 1y ago
  TED sadly has a history of promoting pseudo-science, this one even got a standing ovation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwPoM7lGYHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwPoM7lGYHw
  - pndy 1y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jibal 1y ago
    You've managed to pack a remarkable number of fallacies into one comment. (Which is not to say that I subscribe to her theory--that inference would be yet another fallacy.)
- jampekka 1y ago
  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.
  - ajross 1y ago
sharpshadow 1y ago
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.
mallowdram 1y ago
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.
BrenBarn 1y ago
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/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00115/full 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/S0149763416305796?via%3Dihub 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.
michaelsbradley 1y ago
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-for-the-occurrence-of-a-high-current-zpinch 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-occurrence-of-a-high-current-z-pinch-aurora-as-recorded- https://archive.org/details/characteristics-for-the-occurren...
- jcranmer 1y ago
  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."
  - michaelsbradley 1y ago
    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.
wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
Ancient emojis.
- ljlolel 1y ago
  More like WiFi war-driving symbols
3oil3 1y ago
What's up with that NES gamepad symbol in Europe?
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  Well, Mario is Italian, right?
codedokode 1y ago
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.
- Sporktacular 1y ago
  It's been suggested that cuneiform was driven by exactly that.
- retrac 1y ago
  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_AN1926.606.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jemdet_Nasr_tablet_A... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_list.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_...
pkdpic 1y ago
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 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams 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.
- mallowdram 1y ago
  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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23890291/
Sporktacular 1y ago
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.
- jibal 1y ago
  sleight
JoeDaDude 1y ago
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.
geor9e 1y ago
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.
- vintermann 1y ago
  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)
  - jibal 1y ago
    > But stone age people did pass things down thousands of years. This page is rife with fallacies of affirmation of the consequent.
- vanderZwan 1y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelingual_deafness
  - jibal 1y ago
    It does hold up, and your comment is a bizarre non sequitur.
nelox 1y ago
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.
- ActionHank 1y ago
  Isn't communicating symbolic thought through drawn symbols that are understood by multiple people the definition of writing?
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    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
    - simiones 1y ago
      > 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.
buildsjets 1y ago
It says something about copper… and ingots. An impugning of someone’s character seems to be involved.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  If 40,000 years old, you're probably talking more about rock.
tug2024 1y ago
[dead]
WalterBright 1y ago
I am amazed that the - symbol appears to have been invented over and over!
aa-jv 1y ago
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 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."
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  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".
  - aa-jv 1y ago
    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...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 1y ago
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_literature 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.)
allemagne 1y ago
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.

189 points by mdp2021 1y ago

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago

Reminds me of Prometheus (2012 Alien prequel) 17 minutes and 50 seconds in.

andy99 1y ago
Yes that was my first thought too.
an0malous 1y ago
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-valley-script https://labyrinths.xyz/posts/the-socorro-insignia-and-indus-...
- jibal 1y ago
  There are no "UFO craft".

yieldcrv 1y ago

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.

dyauspitr 1y ago
We’re so young. 40 millennium is honestly nothing on universal timescales.
- tomrod 1y ago
  Ensuring sentience survives heat death of the universe would be a marvelously unifying goal.
- an0malous 1y ago
  But it is on civilizational timescales, that’s the point
jampekka 1y ago
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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3049097/

txru 1y ago

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/mg30990701.jpg https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/m... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_lexical_and_typological_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_l...

derriz 1y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  You don't understand. The other 99,970 symbols are just random doodles. It's the 30 common ones that aren't.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    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.

ajross 1y ago

This is junk science. The illustration is absolutely bonkers: https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/02/28230224/cavedoodles.jpg 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.

jonny_eh 1y ago
TED sadly has a history of promoting pseudo-science, this one even got a standing ovation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwPoM7lGYHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwPoM7lGYHw
- pndy 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jibal 1y ago
  You've managed to pack a remarkable number of fallacies into one comment. (Which is not to say that I subscribe to her theory--that inference would be yet another fallacy.)
jampekka 1y ago
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.
- ajross 1y ago

sharpshadow 1y ago

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.

mallowdram 1y ago

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.

BrenBarn 1y ago

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/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00115/full 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/S0149763416305796?via%3Dihub 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.

michaelsbradley 1y ago

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-for-the-occurrence-of-a-high-current-zpinch 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-occurrence-of-a-high-current-z-pinch-aurora-as-recorded- https://archive.org/details/characteristics-for-the-occurren...

jcranmer 1y ago
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."
- michaelsbradley 1y ago
  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.

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago

Ancient emojis.

ljlolel 1y ago
More like WiFi war-driving symbols

3oil3 1y ago

What's up with that NES gamepad symbol in Europe?

BrenBarn 1y ago
Well, Mario is Italian, right?

codedokode 1y ago

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.

Sporktacular 1y ago
It's been suggested that cuneiform was driven by exactly that.
retrac 1y ago
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_AN1926.606.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jemdet_Nasr_tablet_A... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_list.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_...

pkdpic 1y ago

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 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams 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.

mallowdram 1y ago
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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23890291/

Sporktacular 1y ago

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.

jibal 1y ago
sleight

JoeDaDude 1y ago

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.

geor9e 1y ago

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.

vintermann 1y ago
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)
- jibal 1y ago
  > But stone age people did pass things down thousands of years. This page is rife with fallacies of affirmation of the consequent.
vanderZwan 1y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelingual_deafness
- jibal 1y ago
  It does hold up, and your comment is a bizarre non sequitur.

nelox 1y ago

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.

ActionHank 1y ago
Isn't communicating symbolic thought through drawn symbols that are understood by multiple people the definition of writing?
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  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
  - simiones 1y ago
    > 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.

buildsjets 1y ago

It says something about copper… and ingots. An impugning of someone’s character seems to be involved.

rsynnott 1y ago
If 40,000 years old, you're probably talking more about rock.

tug2024 1y ago

[dead]

WalterBright 1y ago

I am amazed that the - symbol appears to have been invented over and over!

aa-jv 1y ago

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 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."

actionfromafar 1y ago
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".
- aa-jv 1y ago
  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...

deleted 1y ago

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rsynnott 1y ago

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_literature 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.)

allemagne 1y ago

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.