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This is junk science. The illustration is absolutely bonkers: https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/02/28230224/cavedoodles.jpg https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/0

by 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
  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.
  - jampekka 1y ago
    Such work e.g. here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00704-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00704-x
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knurling
      - jampekka 1y ago
        These patterns are found in paintings too.
        jibal 1y ago
        So what?
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  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.
GartzenDeHaes 1y ago
The uniform scale of the symbols is deceptive since the source drawings have substantially different sizes. The hand outline is hand sized, for instance.
tom_ 1y ago
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that Neanderthals were the intellectual equals of humans.
bbor 1y ago
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 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...
- ajross 1y ago
  > 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.
- jibal 1y ago
  That's a lot of strawmen.

by ajross 1y ago

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
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.
- jampekka 1y ago
  Such work e.g. here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00704-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00704-x
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knurling
    - jampekka 1y ago
      These patterns are found in paintings too.
      - jibal 1y ago
        So what?
Mistletoe 1y ago
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.

GartzenDeHaes 1y ago

The uniform scale of the symbols is deceptive since the source drawings have substantially different sizes. The hand outline is hand sized, for instance.

tom_ 1y ago

Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that Neanderthals were the intellectual equals of humans.

bbor 1y ago

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 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...

ajross 1y ago
> 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.
jibal 1y ago
That's a lot of strawmen.