From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 14:13:49 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> 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."
Of course no one knows with absolute certainty whether the paintings tell a
story, but some of them certainly do seem to tell a story. For example
yesterday in response to this thread I started browsing the web for
prehistoric cave paintings, and found one that appeared to be a depiction of
a hunter. On his right there were 2 beasts of some kind. On this left were 4
beasts of some other kind. (I'm going from memory here. I think those were
the quantities of beasts -- however the exact numbers are not important
here). I would guess the painter was painting a picture-story about an
especially memorable hunting expedition, and that he knew the difference
between "2 beasts" and "4 beasts" even if he could communicate those numbers
only by painting the number of objects.
Other paintings look like true works of art, made for the sake of art alone
(or perhaps for religious reasons). The skill of some paleolithic painters
was actually quite amazing. I know I could never paint as well as some of
them. The paintings are a reminder to me that paleolithic peoples were not
so very different from us. The graceful strokes apparent in some paintings
show that at least some paleos were very sensitive and artistic. Paleo
people were not just stupid brutes as they are so typically characterized to
be.
>> 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.
Yes, well this is my point. You wanted evidence for "a move in that
direction" toward writing and math prior to agriculture. Cave paintings are
exactly such evidence.
I agree of course that our intellectual progress accelerated dramatically
when we settled into complex farming societies. I just wanted to make it
clear that this was only an escalation of a process that started long before
the advent of agriculture. We cannot thank agriculture for the ability to do
math and write language. We can thank it only for adding more selection
pressure to the development of these traits that were already under pressure
for development anyway. There is no reason to think we would not have made
it to this level eventually even had we never learned to plant seeds.
Farming only got us here faster.
We humans are, by nature, curious about the world. This trait of curiosity
is I think at the root of intellectual progress. Farming did not make us
curious. It only made us fat. :)
-gts
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