Comment by cavetalk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cavetalk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think these cave drawings are a global written language, not a universal spoken language.

- Smushed oval is water, because it looks like a water drop from the side.

- Hand is a person or family or tribe.

- Hand surrounded by circle is what is around us, water around us, swim.

- Jagged line is danger. Having to dart back-and-forth to get away from a predator or rough sharp rocks.

- Small filled circles are rocks.

- Large circle is large body of water.

- Group of open circles is area that gets rain or is wet.

- Vertical lines are a penetrable forest.

- Crosshatch is an impenetrable area.

- Three lines up to point are a place to gather/sleep/have a fire.

- Four lines coming up is fire/dry brush to make fire.

- Horizontal line is a plain/flat area.

- U-shape is a significant valley or dip.

- Tree-branch looking thing means a place to get wood for fire.

- Snake symbol is snake/going around obstacles/not a direct path.

- Lines covered by line at top is a hut/shelter, because it's made with trees.

- The spiral is home/where to go/journey.

- The X is a rest spot or a place where things are put. People had to be on top of each other for warmth, and spears/tools may go in a pile.

- The rectangle with bent top is ocean, deep water, or pit with water.

This is retrofitting. It's not what these references mean.

These are entoptics. We've tested their neural sources for 40 years.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395

Google entoptics and look at the graphic array.

Tested what, exactly?

I suggest the symbols are morospiles. That's a term from Greek meaning "stupid blemish". This too can be tested: get a bunch of stupid people together to paint on a wall, see what marks they make, measure the degree of similarity to cave art, write a paper about it titled "Maybe They Were Stupid?". Repeat this a hundred times and you've got a field of study to cite authoritatively.

Matching occipital and retinal/purkinje patterns and mapped them to these at scale.

The human mind is so oriented towards pattern matching that we perceive patterns in random noise.

Your statement is a narrative illusion. Science is about pattern seeking and then correlating data about those patterns. They have zilch to do with one another.

> These are entopics

Without a time machine, that opinion is no more valid than people keeping a consistent mapping and storytelling language by drawing in the dirt. There is evidence on both sides.

For example, the picture of the entrance stone on this page uses spirals:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art

The spirals from Newgrange. Those are indeed claimed to "resemble phosphenes" in Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? which this person posted in another comment. They are neolithic, which is a very long way from paleolithic, not just in time but in development of ideas. The paper has another montage of images with the Gundestrup cauldron in it! That was made in the small hundreds AD. It's just a grab-bag of anything that looks shamanic to support the thesis "maybe they were tripping", about everybody everywhere throughout time, and yes, fair point, maybe they were tripping, it's worth bearing in mind. Also, maybe they were stupid. So what? Is this a solution to any problem?

Not so. As these are isolated occurring form constants popping up outside of any possible diffusion, their universality prior to symbolic or pictographic coherences indicate an interim state between expression and symbol.

The rush to claim these are a language is unsupported and is quite suspicious of a retrofitting that's prone to pseudoscience.

I would read Paleoperformance and Paleopoetics for discussions about pre-literate, pre-symbolic cultures from the archeological evidence.

Imposing intent or causality onto these is a bit bizarre.

“ I think these cave drawings are a global written language”

Any particular evidence to back up that claim?

Your explanations sound arbitrary and about as likely as anything else.

The people who made the symbol once may have had a sense of meaning they wanted to communicate.

You sir is pissing all over it.

You really need to add a heavy usage of the conditional in your descriptions.

There is no world in which any of those symbols can ever be known, except time travel - and even then there will be a communication problem.

I'm interested to know if the top left character in both Europe and North America actually looks like that. It's the radical for roof in Chinese. Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.

> Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.

Are you kidding? Two thousand years ago they would have looked like seal script.

That radical is known today as the 宝盖 ("cover of 宝"), so here's the character 宝 itself. The roof is prominently featured: https://img.zdic.net/zy/jinwen/32_F420.svg

( You can see other instances from the same period at http://zdic.net/zd/zx/jw/%E5%AE%9D )

Would you be able to recognize the radical? Would you be able to recognize the character?

> I think these cave drawings are a global written language

And yet they aren't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com