Today's Nerdy Thing

Humans were writing on walls 42,000 years ago

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar

05 January 2023

Abstract
In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens groups drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 BP (Before Present) and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 BP. Since their discovery ~150 years ago, the purpose or meaning of European Upper Palaeolithic non-figurative signs has eluded researchers. Despite this, specialists assume that they were notational in some way. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication. We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months. We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies. Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern. We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means. It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.

Introduction
Around 37,000 years ago humans transitioned from marking abstract images such as handprints, dots and rectangles on cave walls to drawing, painting and engraving figurative art. These images, whether created on rock surfaces in the open air, in caves, or carved and engraved onto portable materials, were almost exclusively of animals, mainly herbivorous prey critical to survival in the Pleistocene Eurasian steppes. In most cases it is easy to identify the species depicted, and often the characteristics they exhibit at particular times of year. In Lascaux around 21,500 years ago, body shapes and pelage details were used to convey information about the sequence of rutting of several prey species on the cave's walls, in what was essentially an ethological calendar (Aujoulat Reference Aujoulat2005), and elsewhere, indicators such as the presence of antlers and aggressive confrontations are widespread indicators that seasonality, particularly that relating to creation, was a major characteristic of the earliest figurative art, as one might expect for hunter-gatherers.

Alongside these images, sets of abstract marks, particularly sequences of vertical lines and dots, <Y> shapes and various other marks are common throughout the European Upper Palaeolithic, occurring either alone or adjacent to and superimposed upon animal depictions, as has long been recognized (e.g. Hayden Reference Hayden2021; Leroi-Gourhan Reference Leroi-Gourhan1966; Reference Leroi-Gourhan, Leroi-Gourhan and Allain1979). These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021). While the nature of accumulation of these is well known, and it is uncontroversial to assume that they mark information such as the passing of time and events within it, their specific meaning has remained elusive.

Our interest is with those non-figurative signs of the European Upper Palaeolithic associated with animal depictions, a relationship found with ~66 per cent of figurative images, according to Sauvet (Reference Sauvet1987). A variety of signs are associated with animal depictions, because of which it is sensible to assume that they had several meanings (Crellin Reference Crellin2020). This should be unsurprising, given that hunter-gatherers world-wide have used a wide range of recording, counting and communications systems involving subjects and numbers (e.g. de Smedt & de Cruz Reference de Smedt and de Cruz 2011; Overmann Reference Overmann 2013; Thornton Reference Thornton 2003).

We focus specifically on two clear and simple patterns: animals associated with sequences of dots/lines (assumed to function similarly here), and the branching <Y> sign in which a second line diverges from a first (Figs 1 & 2). Although these occur throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, the greater majority of known examples date to the Late Upper Palaeolithic, possibly suggesting their meaning changed over time or they became far more common aspects of depictions from the Mid Upper Palaeolithic (Gravettian) onwards. As the identification of the animal with which the signs are associated is unambiguous, we investigate the meaning of the dots/lines and <Y> sign in ethological context. We do this by testing ecologically grounded hypotheses about prey behaviour using a database of such depiction-associated sequences. We reason that investigating the numbers of signs associated with images and the position of <Y> within line/dot sequences provide useful indicators of their meaning, based on the uncontroversial assumption that dots/lines represent numbers. By simple reasoning, the association of a number with an unambiguous subject—a horse, for example—might provide the foundation of a notational system that we could potentially analyse for further meaning. We reveal a system that was stable over a wide geographical area and over a period of tens of thousands of years.

- more -

Today's Über Nerd

(pay wall)

Nobel in medicine awarded to Svante Pääbo for discoveries on human evolution

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient DNA helped change our understanding of human origins.

Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments. It was a “seemingly impossible task,” said Anna Wedell, a member of the Nobel committee.

The work was transformative, showing that Neanderthals mixed with prehistoric humans after they migrated out of Africa, and the vestiges of those interactions live on today in the genomes of present-day people. Pääbo’s efforts laid the foundation of a new field of science that uses ancient DNA as a new stream of information to probe human evolution.

Pääbo, 67, learned he had won the prize in a midmorning phone call from the Nobel committee.

“He was overwhelmed. He was speechless, very happy,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly. “He was incredibly thrilled about this award.”As a young scientist, Pääbo focused on understanding how adenoviruses interacted with the immune system. But he retained an interest in human origins, and worked on isolating DNA from Egyptian mummies as a side project.

At the time, the ancient DNA field was “kind of a joke,” full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“It was Svante, who came along and made this into a science,” Hawks said.

For decades, Pääbo chipped away at the difficult task of analyzing ancient DNA, devising ways to overcome the technical challenges of working with samples that degrade over time and are easily contaminated. He worked largely on DNA from extinct animals, but always with the goal of bringing the techniques he was developing to modern humans’ extinct, big-brained relatives, Neanderthals.

Once he had developed those methods, he brought together a large consortium of scientists and built the relationships necessary to obtain the ancient bone fragments needed to take on the monumental task of trying to decipher the genome of Neanderthals.

That work disrupted the prevailing view of human origins. Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago, but they emerged into a world filled with other hominid species — and mixed with them as they migrated.

Pääbo and colleagues showed that Neanderthals, extinct for 30,000 years, live on in our DNA. As modern humans migrated outside of Africa, they mixed with Neanderthals, making up about 1 to 2 percent of the genomes of non-African people today. From a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Russia, he discovered a new species of early hominid, the Denisovans.

This genetic inheritance is relevant for understanding aspects of human health today. A version of a gene that gives people an advantage at high altitude that is common among people living in Tibet today has Denisovan origins. Some genes that influence how present-day people’s immune systems respond to infections are inherited from Neanderthals.

“These are profound things that happened to human biology, and we need to know about it — it is an important part of the inheritance,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “It’s changed our biology and the history of everybody. We all know we are all mixed.”

Reich said the prize was a thrilling recognition for a scientist he considers a close friend and collaborator — and for a burgeoning field of science that has transformed science’s view of the human species.

Reich was a key part of the consortium that helped determine that Neanderthals had mixed with humans, and said that when he joined the project, he — like many in the field — expected to find little evidence of mixing between Neanderthals and humans.

“When we saw the first evidence that it had occurred … it was surprising and unexpected, and I thought it was likely to be an error of our analysis — and I spent a lot of time trying to make it go away,” Reich said.

Ultimately, multiple lines of evidence supported the conclusion.

Before Pääbo’s contributions, scientists were limited to studying ancient bones and artifacts to understand human ancestors. His work has established a new field of science, paleogenomics, that uses ancient DNA analysis to probe questions about prehistoric questions.

While Pääbo’s scientific work has been transformative, some wondered whether it would win a Nobel, often considered science’s highest honor, because it wasn’t an obvious fit to the categories. In science, Nobels are awarded to medicine or physiology, physics and chemistry.

Hawks, however, argues that understanding human ancestry and evolution is a direct window into understanding deep questions about health and disease. Ancient DNA opened the window to asking deep questions about ancient humans and their relatives that would otherwise be inaccessible.

“This isn’t just a strange thing about our evolution that we’re learning — it’s relevant to our health,” Hawks said. “It matters because our ancestry is what is affecting our health, and when you uncover the genes that we inherited from these distant ancestors that matter to our health, you’re going to open a new window into understanding human disease.”

And it turns out the guy's a legacy, but I won't hold that against him - looks like he's earned it.

Forty years earlier, Pääbo’s father, Sune Bergström, won a Nobel Prize.

We Go On

From the first human handprint on a cave wall
Or a picture on someone's phone
We're part of something continuous
Something that will proceed without us
But there will always be something of us left behind
For the next ones to find
We don't just die and decay
We don't just dissolve back into the clay
We go on

Today I Learned

ScienceAlert:

The Genome of a Human From an Unknown Population Has Been Recovered From Cave Dirt

A cup of mud that has been buried beneath the floor of a cave for millennia has just yielded up the genome of an ancient human.

Analysis reveals traces of a woman who lived 25,000 years ago, during the last ice age; and, although we don't know much about her, she represents a significant scientific achievement: the feasibility of identifying ancient human populations even when there are no bones to recover.

The sample also yielded DNA from wolf and bison species, which an international team of scientists were able to place in the context of their population histories.

"Our results," they wrote in their paper, "provide new insights into the Late Pleistocene genetic histories of these three species and demonstrate that direct shotgun sequencing of sediment DNA, without target enrichment methods, can yield genome-wide data informative of ancestry and phylogenetic relationships."

The recovery of ancient DNA has typically relied rather a lot on bones, and luck. First, you need the bones to have survived, and survived intact enough to preserve DNA over many thousands of years.

Then you need to be able to find them, and recover enough genetic material for sequencing. It's painstaking work, but rewarding - ancient DNA is able to fill a lot of gaps in the evolutionary history not just of humans, but other life as well.

A lot of archaeological sites have more evidence of hominid use than bones, however. The cave of Satsurblia in Georgia is one such site. Artifacts such as stone tools survive the rigor of time better than bones, so it's not surprising. Even so, the cave was used by ancient humans for thousands of years, and yet only a single individual's genome from the site had ever been sequenced, from a human that lived 15,000 years ago.

Environmental DNA, that can be found preserved in the sediment, is increasingly looking like an excellent way to learn more about the past. It is deposited in feces, as we saw with the recovery of ancient bear DNA earlier this year, or fragments of bone that have been ground to dust.

So a team of scientists led by evolutionary biologist Pere Gelabert and archaeologist Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna in Austria went looking for environmental DNA in Satsurblia cave. They obtained six soil samples and carefully sifted through them, looking for traces of genetic material.

They found them in the form of mitochondrial DNA. Fragmentary and incomplete, but, once painstakingly pieced together, sufficient to yield new information about the populations that once inhabited the region.

First, the woman. Only a tiny fraction of her genome was recovered, but from that, the researchers were able to infer that she was a member of a previously unknown group of modern humans. That group is now extinct, but it contributed to present day populations in Europe and Asia, as discovered when the ancient genome was compared to current human genomes.

- more -

Slouching Towards Oblivion

1. SkyNet Apocalypse
2. Gray Goo
3. Engineered Pandemic
4. Cloudless Desert
5. CO₂ Poisoning

The Sci-Show

(try to pretend you don't notice they fucked up the numbering)

The "good news" is that we could do all kinds of great stuff, and make some really smart decisions, and not just avoid the worst of the bad consequences, but actually do ourselves big huge favors in terms of living better, more peaceful, more fulfilling lives.

Yeah no - we're fucked. We all know it.

Seeing Things

para ● doh ● lee ● uh 

Pareidolia is the tendency for perception of a visual stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer.

Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon Rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music, in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.

Pareidolia was at one time considered a symptom of psychosis, but it is now seen as a normal human tendency. Scientists have taught computers to use visual clues to "see" faces and other images.

Do Something Nice

Humans can really fuck things up - and that's exactly what we've been doing.

But we have the capacity to make things right too. Maybe we should do that more often.

I will never be in the camp with people who say idiotic things like "Well, maybe electing Trump was actually a good thing because the backlash against him will give us a great chance to make things better when he's gone."

Fuck that shit. I'm not stupid enough to think it's OK for some kid to die horribly in a car crash so we can feel righteously motivated to make the improvements in passenger safety that we knew all along would prevent that kid from being killed in the first fuckin' place.

We know what to do.

We know how to do it.

So let's get it done.

This Combustible Mixture

...of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

Carl Sagan:

Today's Yay, Humans

I do wonder though - is it customary to carry an ax while ice skating in Sweden?

Be Amazed

Maybe 52,000 years ago.

Sarah Kaplan, WaPo:

Radio isotope dating of a calcite crust that covers part of the image revealed that it is more than 40,000 years old, and possibly as old as 52,000 years. Even the more recent date would make the image older than any painted representation of an animal that has been found.
- and -

“Maybe it’s universal,” said Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia. “Art ... is something that we as humans just do."

Irreducibly Subjective

That's what Sam's main point is regarding "Consciousness". Everything after that main point usually makes my brain hurt - about the same as There's No Such Thing As Free Will, so yeah - ow, dammit.

Today's Winner

From HuffPo, this one wins the internet for today:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
--and--

There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).

But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.

...establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...

How does "I'm good, fuck y'all" fit with the basics of our founding document?

Infestation

Alex Nails It

Something about "the mouths of babes" maybe?

The Deepness Of My "Thinking"

One of many vexing questions: Do I move on, looking for another more beautiful place - or do I stay, and work at making this place beautiful again?

Go Places, Do Things

I have to wonder tho' - by thinking there's some place else we can go, we can continue the rationalization that it's OK for us not to take good care of this place.

Today's Eewww

Science (and the dogged relentless pursuit of What Da Fuck) does not always lead to rainbow-farting unicorns, or - really - to anything guaranteed not to make your skin crawl.  I can almost understand why some people just throw up their hands and say, "Fuck this - I'm goin' with Jesus".

Almost.

At about 2:05, you might feel a powerful urge to run and hide.



Go ahead - do some porn surfing with the key word 'hairy' - do it now.  I fuckin' dare ya.

Synchronicity

I'm wondering if there's anything that can be drawn from this having to do with our seeming need to look alike and act alike and think alike -  is there something physical that drives us towards conformity that can be so simple (and subtle) that we don't even notice it?

Way Off In The Weeds On This One

I guess this is kinda like needing to know what you know before you can know what you don't know - which is how you know that you don't really know much of anything at all.

So the more you learn, the less you know how much or how little you actually know, depending on what you know.



My head hurts.  This shit's worse than math.

hat tip = d r i f t g l a s s