Discussion

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs

truhistory: This article is just pushing the tired narrative that civilization rose up out of Africa 40000 years ago. We already have the 700000 year old artifacts from Ireland and the U.K. indicating it emerged from seafaring cultures known as Atlantis that existed up to a million years ago until being wiped out in battle against ancient Athens as related to Plato from ancient Egyptians.This info will be flagged by those who want you to go to war for their gods.

SetTheorist: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-3586318612,500 years ago seems to be a more sensible and evidence-based estimate.

truhistory: Take a look at the Waterford Axe and others. The ice age wiped out most of history.

iberator: 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.

WalterBright: They could also be simply idle doodling or decorations.

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

WalterBright: I remain skeptical. Pictures in clouds.

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

amatecha: 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

shimman: 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=eA9JYWh1r7UI bet there are many more similar stories yet to be told.

citizenpaul: 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.

Xss3: 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.

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

cwmoore: Teacher wouldn’t allow it.

djtango: 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...

dlisboa: 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.

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

chmod775: 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.

jamiek88: Plus all the lead we spewed into the air for three generations.

AlotOfReading: 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.

ggm: 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.

WalterBright: 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.

gerdesj: 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.

stevenwoo: 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.

card_zero: The researchers were not invested in thinking of that.

dhosek: 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).

dash2: But they explicitly discuss it!

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

card_zero: 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.

card_zero: 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.

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

jgtrosh: 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

WalterBright: 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...

WalterBright: > 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.

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

card_zero: 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.

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

singularity2001: Contradicted by the marks on the side and back of the badge

cenamus: 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

WalterBright: 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!

JR1427: Looks just like stylised shaggy fur to me.

OJFord: 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.

Netcob: For that they used their Warhammer 80k figurines

erikerikson: 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.

konfusinomicon: 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

Arch485: 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)

WalterBright: 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.

OJFord: 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.

pavel_lishin: 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

kazinator: > 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.