Code hidden in Stone Age art may be the root of human writing (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Code hidden in Stone Age art may be the root of human writing (2016)

newscientist.com

56 pointsDanBC22 comments

I love it - as a fan of the crackpot Szukalski, seeing real science making similar conclusions to his, just tickles my pickle.

For those who don't know, Szukalski saw these patterns and similarities in ancient art, decades ago - and from this observation, formulated the theory that there was a common language in the civilisations that sprouted up before 'ancient history' - i.e. a pre-history civilisation, lost in a cataclysm, spread its survivors around the globe - who then coded their common language ("Protong!") into cave art and so on.

I really have to wonder if any of the serious researchers have read the book "Behold! The Protong!" by Szukalski, which recounts his investigation into this topic. It'd be somewhat unique - and terrifying (coz: Zermatism) - to hear that Szukalski was really onto something, all those decades ago ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Szukalski

https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-Williams/dp/086...

Wait.

The yetis are here for our women?

Yeah, I'm not quite willing to go that far into the madness with the crackpot'edness. But I think Protong is an intriguing idea, and that it is being represented artistically with skill, well .. why not ..

Zermatism? That can be ignored safely, I feel. At least until science catches up. And then I suppose none of us Yeti will be safe.

This is very interesting - to see this sort of thing in paleographic studies is very very cool

I remember in my PhD days (studying AI), having long conversations, exploring what it was for an AI to be intelligent. One strand we considered was around language and magic - the central idea we were playing with was that language and magic are intertwined - the role of sympathetic magic in manipulating reality bby manipulating symbols was tied to language as a representation of reality. So the idea of symbolic representation was a key indicator of intelligence.

It would also be amazing if more stone age art was found in underwater caves.

>It would also be amazing if more stone age art was found in underwater caves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

I think that would be almost a given. We know there were certainly hominids (Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens) living there, so if there were caves, it follows there would be cave art.

Just the other day someone asked me "Do you believe [in God]?" I replied "everything is technology". I referred him to just this type story. Speech is technology. Writing is technology and therefore stories are too technology. Everything we hear or read from man is manmade. He paused and thoughtfully said "I never thought about it that way."

All that stuff is the product of human systems, but what about the systems that produce the human?

Also technology, or random chance.

If God exists, he is an explainable piece of "technology". He could be a very powerful one that deserves our respect, but he is explainable. Everything is explainable... eventually.

Technology is our God nowadays.

Remember the days when we all thought everything was deterministic?

If something is "non-deterministic", then it is insufficiently understood.

If God is God, then no, he's not "an explainable piece of technology". Very much not.

An AGI could say the same about humans.

That seems like an overly expansive definition to me. If everything is technology, then the word "technology" ceases to have meaning, no?

How exactly is speech technology? Or stories? I get that invented modes of sharing stories, like writing, are technology. But the stories themselves? "Little Red Riding Hood" is technology?

A little off-topic, the art in the first picture is stunning, the colors, shadows, shapes, lines. I've always imagined random individuals painting in caverns. But looking at this paint makes me wonder how many generations of painters have to pass in order to get into that level of complexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

It's kind of the paleolithic sistine chapel. It's used as a sort of type example of early sapien "behavioral modernity," proof their minds were like ours. If you go back in time from that point, sapiens existed for a long time but the artifacts they left behind were not that different from other species' artifacts.

If current dates are good, there're almost 1,000 generations between the Chavet art and the art in the picture you liked, most of the upper paleolithic. They look similar to me, but idk anything.

I've visited several caves this summer (Lascaux, Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, Rouffignac, and a couple others) and there is a constant: the artists weren't amateurs, they were extremely skilled. First, in many places it was impossible at the time to see the entirety of the drawing at a glance because of the very low height, or the wall curvature, but the proportions are right anyway (most visited caves have been dug out; back then you had to crawl for hundreds of meters in pitch darkness to reach the drawings). Similarly, the animals are drawn with a very high anatomical precision. Even animals that didn't exist locally, like mammoths (which mean that the artist had seen mammoths earlier, very far away).

One of my favorite quotes about this:

> This wasn't just any cave, however -- its walls were festooned with striking pictures of horses and bulls that date from the Ice Age, all rendered with exquisite sophistication and symbolic force. Upon exiting the cave, an awed Picasso declared, "We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years."[1]

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12...

Interesting article.

"The first formal writing system that we know of is the 5000-year-old cuneiform script of the ancient city of Uruk in what is now Iraq. But it and other systems like it – such as Egyptian hieroglyphs – are complex and didn’t emerge from a vacuum. There must have been an earlier time when people first started playing with simple abstract signs. For years, von Petzinger has wondered if the circles, triangles and squiggles that humans began leaving on cave walls 40,000 years ago represent that special time in our history – the creation of the first human code."

My understanding is that the evolution of Sumerian cuneiform is (sort of) well understood, from early markers for goods (a container with six dried clay tokens to represent "I sent six sheep with Elmer, if you did not receive six sheep, there's a problem somewhere") to simplifications of the markers and the rebus principle to early writing. It's not a single step from nothing to writing.

Oh, and the city is Unug in Sumerian. Uruk is Akkadian, a language that over much later.

Another explanation is that the geometric designs are depictions of entoptic phenomena or phosphenes that are seen during trance states. There is remarkable similarity in these designs between groups of ancient people separated by thousands of miles and years: e.g. Australian Aborigines and San in Africa.

The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/203629

Entoptic Imagery and Altered States of Consciousness http://entheology.com/research/entoptic-imagery-and-altered-...

Stone Age code? I tried running it, but it's giving me an error: "You have accidentally used the dummy version of OwlMain."

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