Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs | Hacker News Reader

Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs

pnas.org

157 pointsbikenaga66 comments

The X's on the animal forms (Fig. 1B) ... isn't that likely to be "hit here" type markings, for hunting reference? Shoulder, side, stomach... surprised this wasn't really touched on in the paper, since it seems really likely. Though, the paper doesn't seem to care so much about the actual meanings, seemingly just narrowing down the number of possible interpretations /shrug

Interesting comment, I remember something similar about how researchers thought hairstyles depicted in paintings or statues were unrealistic but it wasn't until a hairstylist pointed out that you can sew the hair together:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-woman-is-a-ha...

I've also heard similar stories about people working with leather recognizing some set of artifacts as being more useful for work rather than ceremonial.

Here's of video of creating a roman Vestal Virgins hairstyle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA9JYWh1r7U

I bet there are many more similar stories yet to be told.

Ever tried carving a regular pattern, such as XXXXXXX, in a piece of wood? The blade keeps getting stuck on the wrong course, the angle deviates from vertical, you have to retry strokes and they don't land in the same place the second time. If the work piece is small your accuracy goes down. In this case they're carving bone, which may be easier, but the tool is a tiny piece of flint held between fingers.

So then instead of XXXXXXX the researchers record X/\XXV/X. Let's run that through some mystifying statistical software and tell the world about its information content! Or "complexity", which might not be information.

Come to think of it, an example of misunderstood artifacts from this period, the Aurignacian, is the "perforated baton", formerly proposed to be held at meetings for the right to speak, now found out to be a spear shaft straightener.

I remember the two gourds connected by a 75 foot string was interpreted as a "telephone". Apparently nobody has tried it out, and there's no mention of anyone trying to make one with a modern gourd.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/there...

Huh, but that's totally a tin can telephone. Would be a fun project for an experimental archeologist. The cans - I mean gourds - have little drumskin membranes stretched over them! The twine looks like the only dubious part, too stretchy maybe. Not sure what qualities an acoustic transmission line should have.

Make one out of gourds and see if it works.

If you have to yell in it, though, the other end can hear you 75 feet away just fine without it!

Why would it not? The string/twine is more the key to it really, are you thinking the gourd would be too dampening? They do say it's resin-coated.

I'm not saying I buy that that's what this was made for or how it was used, but I do reckon you can make a functional 'telephone' of this style with gourds.

Try it and see.

I seriously doubt twine would be a good carrier of vibrations over 75 feet. The fibers would dampen it out. Then there's the mass of the gourds, I doubt the faint vibrations left would vibrate them to a point you could hear anything.

I also suspect that the reason nobody tries it is because then the theory that it is a Fred Flintstone telephone falls apart.

The onus isn't really on me, it's not my device, I'm not even the organisation/article author claiming it is functional. You claim it can't work, have you tried it and seen? (Although admittedly you can't really show by practical experiment that it can't possibly be done.)

I do think it's more likely it was for use as a rope, with gourd weights to ease throwing.

The burden of proof should be on the people writing academic papers asserting it is a telephone.

Just like if someone claims they found a way to use water as an automobile fuel. I don't need to prove it doesn't work. They need to prove it does.

Some of the marks on it, particularly the head marks, are right over areas of the thickest bones. It's not impossible, but always worth being self-critical of "obvious" meanings with things like this.

Things that are straightforward even to us as non-expert megafaunal hunters would probably be completely obvious to actual experts (if it's not wrong), and people usually don't want to record the obvious stuff.

It's also possible the meaning is inverted. Kill the animal by throwing a spear anywhere other than these places

And put the armor where the bullet holes on surviving planes aren't.

Yeah I was wondering about that too (the shoulder area for example), conversely maybe striking there is the most likely to cripple the animal, thus making it easier to catch? But I was thinking that as well, "maybe these are the least desirable areas to strike". Either way I was just surprised they really skimmed over the "meaning", when I expected the paper would have delved a bit further into that.

I like JR's "shaggy fur" interpretation, but my initial thought for the mammoth was that it might be butcher markings? (as someone who is not a butcher and knows less than they should about anatomy)

The Xs are in the wrong place relative to modern ethical kill standards, selected for immediate lethality. Instead those are around the heart and lungs.

Contradicted by the marks on the side and back of the badge

Looks just like stylised shaggy fur to me.

    "What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
       Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
    So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
       "They are merely conventional signs!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43909/the-hunting-of-...

Absolutely fascinating study. I look forward to more as the density of materials rises.

I would observe that calligraphy such as in Islamic art, frequently conveys two messages. One is more abstract such as it's compelling beauty, but it can also be strongly representational. A word about swans in the shape of a Swan.

So I don't see "it's just decoration" as a strong rebuttal. It may be decorative. It can also convey meaning.

They could also be simply idle doodling or decorations.

Yes, the specialist researchers didn't think of that.

The researchers were not invested in thinking of that.

But they explicitly discuss it!

I wouldn't mind a quote, because the paper was incredibly hard to read, full of hedging, and never seemed to get to the point.

OK, there's this section:

> The Question of Decoration.

> Recent studies have measured the regularity of notches on bones to determine whether they are more or less visually striking as a decoration. Increasing the regularity of distances between notches—up to the differences just about perceivable by humans—is argued to enhance the decorative value. Such technological and experimental analyses are useful to thoroughly understand the production processes behind a given mobile artifact. On the other hand, categories such as “decoration” and “numerical system,” or “decoration” and “writing system” are not mutually exclusive. Rather, sign systems can be used as decoration without losing their information value. This is exemplified in historic times by calligraphy, inscriptions on pottery and temples, tattoos of graphemes on human bodies, and many other artistic expressions. “Information density” in an information-theoretic sense is a fundamental property of a sign sequence, irrespective of whether there is a human present to interpret it—or merely find it aesthetically pleasing.

So what are they saying: yes it looks like decoration, but maybe that's because it's calligraphy, and it's less than completely random. That means it's proto-writing because there's a scientific theory we can use to cloud the question of what it is exactly that we're claiming.

The BBC article on this quotes a researcher saying "The Stone Age sign sequences are an early alternative to writing." Fucking hell, "alternative to writing". We're not going out on a limb and saying its writing, but we want to heavily imply that without risking being wrong.

I think the paper was just an exploration of various possibilities and doesn't come to any firm conclusion, because there isn't enough information to conclude anything.

I would assume that people in the past generally did things because they found it useful, though, and the idea that they were merely idly creating art is a more remarkable claim than that they were doing something primarily utilitarian, at least from their point of view.

To me, all of it seems like tally marks and counting and tally marks are among the earliest forms of writing we have in pretty much every case that I am aware of.

Yah, I'm not impressed by the obtuse language, either.

considering there are so many of them I think you are right.

For that they used their Warhammer 80k figurines

Too bad we don't have a paper that applies information theory techniques to answer that question. Oh wait...

I remain skeptical. Pictures in clouds.

What are you skeptical about? 40k years ago humans were just as we the humans of today, but they also faced harsher environments to survive in.

Technology has enabled us to compound advanced intergenerationally but I don't really believe we're actually that special when compared to our forebears...

Pictures in clouds, face on mars, pareidolia, I Want To Believe. That's what's to be skeptical about.

Take a look at Fig 1. A grid of dots. A sequence of X's. Does it mean "Property of Thag?" "Happy Birthday, Mom"? Are the X's there to improve one's grip on the object? Are they just idle doodling around the campfire? Hunter-gatherers have little use for writing.

We'll never know.

When I was young I was fascinated by drawing 5 pointed stars. It meant nothing.

Given that pressure from natural selection has lessened a lot, chances are that we are less special now.

Our intellect evolved for survival, but now it's very much optional - has been for many generations. It and may now even be inversely correlated with having offspring.

I would be unsurprised if we're noticably dumber now than we used to be.

We seem to be making up for it with better nutrition and medicine.

Plus all the lead we spewed into the air for three generations.

It's probably both, each lending to the existence of the other.

I remember in my literary theory class, one of the theorists made the (deliberately) absurd claim that writing preceded speech. Reading this, and I wonder if he was correct (as an aside, I tend to wander into the weeds in language articles on Wikipedia as I find myself increasingly curious about language evolution and I always wonder whether the different language families are “merely” a result of linguistic drift over millennia or whether human speech appeared independently in multiple points of origin).

Your instinctive reaction matches with scientific consensus.

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

> Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language. True writing, where the content of linguistic utterances can be accurately reconstructed by later readers, is a later development. As proto-writing is not capable of fully reflecting the grammar and lexicon used in languages, it is often only capable of encoding broad or imprecise information.

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

> vocal languages must have begun diversifying at least 100,000 years ago

> Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language.

And, of course, today we are going backwards to icon proto-writing, with all the same shortcomings.

I have a theory that song used to communicate emotional states precedes and probably evolved into language as we think of it.

Whales also communicate by "song". But at that point it's just their language, whether you classify it as song (pleasant for a human to listen to?) or language doesn't really change that it's used for communication

I like to think that bird song, evolved over millions of years going back to their dinosaur ancestors, is a language that encodes vast amounts of information that our brains can't even begin to understand the complexities of

I'd easily believe that bird songs are vastly more complex and interesting than we currently understand!

If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of "saving" a PNG to a bird:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo

(Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)

The old story of the 'language of the birds' suggests that we can make headway. No one's ever complained of time they wasted listening to birdsong.

There's something about Figure 4 that reminds me of the Codex Seraphinianus, or the Voynich Manuscript.

> Humans have carved visual signs into the surfaces of mobile artifacts [...]

And, undoubtedly, while doing so, some of them walked into something and got hurt.

Ha! And someone today at HN laughed at the research of monkeys playing with crystals...

Maybe one day we could communicate with monkeys with marbles and crystals and stuff as SIGN language.

Imagine monkey soldiers becoming reality in AI WARS.

Sorry to be the wet blanket. However research on monkeys/apes has for the most part proven that their intelligence is at a dead end and never can progress past what is basically around human 2yo level.

That really depends how you measure and define intelligence and does a disservice to them.

Toddlers for example dont tend to have gang wars for territories and certainly couldnt do battle outcome predictions from a glance at a group across thick canopy and the sounds of branches and hollering.

Teacher wouldn’t allow it.

> However research on monkeys/apes has for the most part proven that their intelligence is at a dead end and never can progress past what is basically around human 2yo level.

How do you prove something like that with animals that can come up with a strategy, form battle plans, execute them, etc.

Even a 4 year old has less strategic vision than what is required to wage a prolonged war over years.

Please quote your sources regarding monkey and ape intelligence with regards dead ends (whatever that means), wet blanket.

Please also note you are just a wet blanket and not the wet blanket - that epithet is not normally sought after.

This is not the objective of this book, but The Language Puzzle discusses why primates have never exhibited any verbal language skill as we recognize it past the capability of a infant/toddler, even the best achieving examples we have of primates show they cannot manipulate language as well a child of four or five, and some of those studies with humans raising primates in their homes have some particularly unscientific bits, it also discusses why the vocal abilities of all other primates is lesser than humans and the language centers in brain that we think we know about in humans is also much lesser or not used to the same extent in other primates measured using MRI/anatomy studies, the progression of brain and vocal capabilities of homo sapiens progenitors to develop language via paleontology that shows the divergence from other primates, and many experiments with wild and captive primates of all types to demonstrate some language skill but nothing past very simple meaning for one sound, that might not be common to a geographically separate group, and not always the same meaning for the same group, and the inability of primates to use gestures without lots of prompting for communication. The highest form of communication I remember is one study that shows that orangutangs might be able to communicate a meaning of "in the future" via example warnings about snakes to young ones but you can read about that yourself, it seemed kind of speculative, too. Off top of my head it's a comprehensive overview of primate language research and evolution of physiology of brain/vocal abilities/hands. I don't agree with all the conclusions at end of the book (prior to this everything is based on what we have evidence for so there's a bit of speculation towards the end) but it's fun to think about.

Here's a decent review:https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steven-mithen/the...

well that surely seems to be empirically true...

Apes tend to be way more intelligent than humans of any age about how to hold and consume different vegetables and fruits.

Humans today perhaps. People tend to underestimate our abilities in nature because we’ve evolved to be able to shape it. In reality humans had generationally transmitted oral knowledge of food, plus are the only animals that can transform food at will, including from “toxic” to consumable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com