Independent researcher claims to find writing in prehistoric cave paintings | Hacker News Reader

Independent researcher claims to find writing in prehistoric cave paintings

vice.com

44 pointsJoshTriplett10 comments

"In short, if the new hypothesis is accurate, it shows that our Paleolithic ancestors “were almost certainly as cognitively advanced as we are” and “that they are fully modern humans,” Bacon told Motherboard. It also means “that their society achieved great art, use of numbers, and writing” and “that reading more of their writing system may allow us to gain an insight into their beliefs and cultural values,” he concluded."

It remembers me the first chapter from "The Everlasting Man", Chesterton: https://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlastin...

"In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what be did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club."

I remember first time that I read it, I thought "and if the cave was just their kindergarden, where the cave-kids just spent their time drawing in the cave-wall"

"He enlisted leading archaeologists from Durham University and the University College London to develop the idea and co-author the new study."

Obviously not crank but I suggest "annotation" rather than "writing". For example a physical deer is drawn on a wall as meaning "a deer" - well I hope that is the meaning! By looking at the context in the artworks, such as human figures etc we can infer quite a lot.

This study seems to find that additional marks (previously ignored) have useful meaning too. They are obviously deliberate and seem to be consistent.

Now, that is not writing. I'm writing now. I've studied the Rosetta stone as a civilian and can manage to transliterate a bit of old Egyption hieroglyphics etc. I fumble around English (quite well), German, Latin, French, and others.

The experts are really quite good these days and we have managed to get to grips with some really old languages and writing systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform

This looks like a great find but it is not writing with a script as such - it is annotation. It is a precursor to a writing system.

Related and now on the front page:

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271591 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)

I fail to see how counting months rather than kills makes this writing and not simply counting.

A sequence is not the same as a sum. Counting is not the same as denoting a sequence in a set.

A sequence implies communicating at least two and probably more concepts. Counting at best communicates two things, the amount and the aggregate type. A sequence communicates an order and the ordinal instances present and the type classifier and arguably the terminals of the sequence (both its length and denoted start and end or re-start) and for a cyclical sequence the fact it is a cycle. [Addition: If it's not 6to7 months out of 13 (lunar calendar) it even might have to indicate direction (left to right or right to left) and implicitly denotes summer and winter if not explicitly, the "best" hunting months being tied to seasons.].

Counting is not the same as marking "which"

These are quite complex abstractions. They go to order in time and "best" months to hunt in.

It's language.

The paper goes into that, calling for a discussion on how to define “writing” and, for now, calling this ”proto writing”.

I do agree this is a step up from counting. These messages say things like “(deer) give birth 3 months after the start of spring and disappear after 6”.

Problem, of course, is that this language only has 2 or 3 words (3 symbols, but the paper argues two of them are synonyms), so it requires context such an image of an animal drawn next to it and implicit parts such as “after the start of spring”.

That’s not sufficient to write complex texts, but it is a step up from just tallying stuff.

A kinda interesting - but massively over-hyped - "discovery" about a long-known feature of prehistoric European cave paintings.

because Vice essentially sells eyeball-attention?

We've replaced the title with something less linkbaity, in keeping with the HN guidelines ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Maybe there's some interesting stuff to discuss here? Hopefully we can focus on the content now.

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257150#34266486

Reply on news.ycombinator.com