The Modern Lives of Ancient Symbols | Hacker News Reader

The Modern Lives of Ancient Symbols

discovermagazine.com

21 pointsnew_guy13 comments

It was tens of thousands of years ago when drawings were made on cave walls.

Did you know that

"After examining dozens of Ice Age cave sites across Europe, paleoarchaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger discovered our ancestors repeatedly used 32 signs." [1]

"That fits well with the discovery of a 70,000-year-old block of ochre etched with cross-hatching in Blombos cave in South Africa. And when von Petzinger looked through archaeology papers for mentions or illustrations of symbols in cave art outside Europe, she found that many of her 32 signs were used around the world (see “Consistent doodles”). There is even tantalising evidence that an earlier human, Homo erectus, deliberately etched a zigzag on a shell on Java some 500,000 years ago. “The ability of humans to produce a system of signs is clearly not something that starts 40,000 years ago. This capacity goes back at least 100,000 years,” says Francesco d’Errico from the University of Bordeaux, France." [2]

[1] https://ideas.ted.com/what-the-mysterious-symbols-made-by-ea...

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230990-700-in-searc...

> That fits well with the discovery of a 70,000-year-old block of ochre etched with cross-hatching in Blombos cave in South Africa.

I did a hopeful check to see if it was a hashtag. It was.

I was standing in Magic Kingdom at Disney World in Orlando about a year ago and had a very similar thought:

If alien archeologists ever came to a post-human Earth, they might discover the ruins of Disney World and mistake it for our temples. A tribute to a pantheon of gods.

I guess it sort of _is that_ in a way, ha.

Even more so if they could see the worship games we play in front of our own personal, illuminated alters.

Besides colour schemes for national flags https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257599 another way to guess ages is when regional flags' symbolism rampantly incorporate flagrantly male charges.

Contrast https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapeau_de_la_Californie#/medi...

with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Bern#/media/Fi...

or even https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapeau_et_armoiries_du_canton...

etc.

Is "wedjat" linked to "widget"?

Literally 20 secs of googling would have answered that for you. No. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/widget

Not sure if you're seeing something different on that page, but for my view, the "widget" page makes no mention of "wedjat" and vice versa. But it is spelled "wadjet" instead .. and that page makes no mention of widget either.

Etymology 1 Coined by George S. Kaufman in his play Beggar on Horseback (1924).

Edit: that wedjat/wadjet does not appear on the page does alone suggest there's no link.

Not necessary (rgd the edit). Comparative linguistics (however questionable) is a thing. For example, the page for October - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/October - does not mention any connection to indo-germanic languages where "october, november and december" have roots that map to the sanskrit "ashta, nava, dasha" (eight, nine, ten) which correspond to the eighth, ninth and tenth months in the roman calendar.

It was coined in 1924. It was made up. Invented. Which part of that was unclear?

For some reason that didn't hit me at all. Perhaps I was already in a mode to draw a link. Apologies.

No problem, we've all done that.

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