RE: The mistake of agriculture (was: evolution and diet)

From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 15:23:42 MDT

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    Anders Sandberg wrote:

    > Yes, the Great Leap Forward was amazing. But is there any
    > evidence for math and written language before agriculture, or
    > even any evidence for a move in that direction?

    Yes, of course there is evidence, at least for a move in that direction. For
    example the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, show a painstaking attention
    to detail. The paintings were likely meant to seen by other HG'ers as
    stories about real life events experienced or witnessed by the painters, and
    surely those painters had some concept of the communication of numbers as
    they told their stories in their paintings.

    I see no fundamental distinction between cave paintings of wild animals and
    more abstract symbols representing a number of animals used later during
    Neolithic and modern times. Even a cave painting of an animal is a
    tremendous feat of mental abstraction. A two-dimensional painting of two
    bears in limited colors scratched onto a cave wall, though not what we
    normally call a written word, is nevertheless an abstract symbol
    representing two bears. If written words are abstract symbols portrayed on a
    two dimensional surface and designed to represent real entities then cave
    paintings *are* written words.

    It is true of course that the *degree* of abstraction increased as the need
    for more abstract abbreviations became greater, as during early commerce,
    (hash marks are a lot easier to draw than horses) and the ability to
    manipulate those symbols also grew (early math) but I think it is a mistake
    to think something fundamentally new happened to human mental capacity at
    the advent of agriculture. I think it was a difference only of degree. The
    real breakthrough to symbolic thinking took place at least some 30,000+
    years earlier.

    -gts



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