From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 02:27:00 MDT
On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 05:23:42PM -0400, gts wrote:
> 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.
What stories? As http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm puts it about some
cave paintings: "As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were
painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a
"story" or represented some type of "spirit house" or ritual exercise is
not known." I think that represent the consensus of researchers; I have
myself not seen any old cave paintings that contain any clear story
element (maybe there is something in Scott McCloud's _Understanding
Comics_, but I don't have it within reach).
> 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.
I think linguists would disagree with you, or rather complicate things.
There is no syntax for the animal pictures; they might represent things
and sometimes situations, but their relationships doesn't link together
in any reliable way. Linguists put special emphasis on the difference
between finite communication systems and open ended language systems.
Cave paintings seem unable to express ideas beyond what they depict.
Of course, we might not know the context. Maybe a bull really was the
letter 'A', a hunter was an ideogram of 'man' and a negative picture of
a hand represented the concept of divine foresight, but it does not seem
likely. As Diamond pointed out, invention of writing is hard and has
happened only a few times, but once it is done it is easily copied and
spreads rapidly. The known rapid spread of written languages from a few
places of origen doesn't seem to fit a world where proto-writing already
existed but rather a world where it was a quantum jump.
> 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.
Yes. And many ritual symbols found in the cave paintings likely led to
writing. But my point is that writing like other technologies will not
be likely to flourish outside certain conditions. Agriculture did not
make people smarter, but it produced a socioeconomic situation where
writing was useful in many ways, rather than something only possibly the
tribal shaman sometimes would use. Note that the spread of writing
systems worldwide occured to agricultural societies; to my knowledge no
hunter-gatherer societies did use writing until very recently, if at
all.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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