The other day I listening to some program on TV giving it no attention at all when the narrator started speaking about cavemen leaving messages for others, and that mankind may have been writing far longer than anyone predicted.
It seems that while archeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and other scientists have studied the images in caves -- the horses, bulls, antlered animals, rhinos, and handprints of cavemen, none noticed or ignored the 26 symbols of dots, shapes, finger swirls, etc. around and between the large realistic paintings. That is until four years ago when Genevieve von Petzinger of the University of Victoria in British Columbia and her colleague April Nowell, began looking at those shapes and finding the same symbols repeated through as many as 200 prehistoric sites. According to the new study, it pushes the accepted age of the beginning of communication from about 6,000 years ago to an unbelievable 30,000 years ago. (Just saying -- it shows man as a critical and creative thinking creature far longer in history than anyone imagined.)
According to an article in The Guardian (paragraph 10 -- site also has an image of the symbols):
It seems that while archeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and other scientists have studied the images in caves -- the horses, bulls, antlered animals, rhinos, and handprints of cavemen, none noticed or ignored the 26 symbols of dots, shapes, finger swirls, etc. around and between the large realistic paintings. That is until four years ago when Genevieve von Petzinger of the University of Victoria in British Columbia and her colleague April Nowell, began looking at those shapes and finding the same symbols repeated through as many as 200 prehistoric sites. According to the new study, it pushes the accepted age of the beginning of communication from about 6,000 years ago to an unbelievable 30,000 years ago. (Just saying -- it shows man as a critical and creative thinking creature far longer in history than anyone imagined.)
According to an article in The Guardian (paragraph 10 -- site also has an image of the symbols):
Von Petzinger and her Nowell remain cautious, however. "We cannot use the 'L' or 'W' words yet," says Nowell. "This is not writing as we know it or language as we understand it. However, in these caves we are looking at the patterning of symbols, and if we can unravel that, we can get to their meaning."
Other scientists say there is evidence man was a functioning intellectual being before leaving Africa 70,000 to 90,000 years ago. They have even found some of the same symbols in African caves.
Another article, 'Oldest Writing Nearly Deciphered,' I came across at Discover Communications (as had information on how our computer technology is helping decipher the code of the earliest samples of writing we have from about 5,000 years ago. Sadly this article has gone digitally missing.
This just goes to show what comes around goes around, the ancient's symbols whose meaning has been lost in time but started our imprinting of information may be brought back into understanding by our latest creations, now called technology, of symbols.
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