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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ba...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.)
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.
34 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 68.5 ms ] thread40,000 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.
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...
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.
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.
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 ba...
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...
[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.
There were older ways of communication, but to be a writing system it needs symbolise a spoken language.
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
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.
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."
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.)
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.