From Digventures:
Among the elaborate horses, bulls, bears and hunters, there are some other rather less captivating designs – small geometric motifs, etched onto the walls. Until now, they’ve not received much attention. But as it turns out, these humble designs conceal a much more intriguing mystery.
Von Petzinger and her photographer-husband visited 52 caves across Europe recording every instance of these symbols that they could see. They found new, undocumented examples at 75% of the caves they visited, and found the symbols far outnumbered the human and animal images. But the amazing thing was that however many caves they visited, they found the same 32 shapes being used again and again and again.
The fact that the same 32 symbols are repeated across sites that span 30,000 years and an entire content is nothing less than mindblowing. But what do they actually mean? More.
Well, whatever they mean, if this find holds up, they suggest something: If language precedes writing, language has been around for longer than that.
Note: When there are only a few people and they live far apart, they may develop interlingual symbol systems, to be read by people they may never meet, maybe a decade later. Consider, for example, the inuksuit of the Arctic.
Note 2: Photographer Perrault is clearly a man of the North. With respect to permission to copy his work, he helpfully writes, “You hereby have the permission to use, copy, modify the image and/or pretend to be it’s legitimate author: I couldn’t possibly give any less of a damn.” One suspects that’s how most ancient artists viewed their work too. – O’Leary for News
See also: Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness
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Note: Posting light until late this evening, due to O’Leary for News’ alternate day job.