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