20,000-year-old cave painting 'dots' are the earliest written language, study claims. But not everyone agrees.

[admin]

Stone Age dots, lines and Y-shaped marks might represent a type of proto-writing created by hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe at least 20,000 years ago.

20,000-year-old cave painting 'dots' are the earliest written language, study claims. But not everyone agrees. : Read more

 

[Jeremy]

The dots and lines could well mean something. They do not look like natural colorations of the animals, and many were not part of animal drawings. I wouldn't quite call it "writing" but rather a notational system. Modern human activities also use notation systems, such as music, surveying, various engineering symbols, astrology, carpenters' marks and electronics, to name a few. Researchers may be able to train an artificial intelligence system on a training set and then show it images it hasn't seen before to see if they're reliably deciphered.

 

[Ryonen]

Very interesting article. I do find myself wondering about the fact that the article states "...the researchers discovered that none of the series contained more than 13 marks...". And yet, one of the images included with the article seems to rather clearly show a group of 14 dots. Granted, it is presented in two rows of 7, but to my uninformed eye, it feels more like a group of 14, arranged in two rows for convenience.

 

[Tambria]

Wonder if the 73k year old hashtag silica flake from Blombos Cavestone will be similarly found to be a designated tool labeled by the scribe of that time…

 

[Phoxtrot]

Hum, why "Y" shape could represent birth seems rather obvious to me. "1 becomes 2" or possibly "2 to create 1" or both at once.