
Code hidden in Stone Age art may be the root of human writing (2016) - DanBC
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230990-700-in-search-of-the-very-first-coded-symbols/
======
mmjaa
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Szukalski)

[https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-
Williams/dp/086...](https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-
Williams/dp/0867195193)

~~~
mcguire
Wait.

The yetis are here for our women?

~~~
mmjaa
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.

------
steve_gh
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.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland)

~~~
poulsbohemian
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.

------
usermac
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."

~~~
jackstraw14
All that stuff is the product of human systems, but what about the systems
that produce the human?

~~~
DecoPerson
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.

~~~
creep
Remember the days when we all thought everything was deterministic?

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

------
elboru
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.

~~~
wazoox
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).

------
mcguire
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.

------
mr_overalls
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](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-...](http://entheology.com/research/entoptic-imagery-and-altered-
states-of-consciousness/)

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

