Thanks! Much more interesting. Some details of the paper's claims that I enjoyed:
- the system was stable over (i.e. their dataset covers) thousands of years
- it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected.
- they hypothesise a lunar calendar that begins with spring. It just kinda fizzles out during winter when there are no particularly interesting "dates". hus it isn't disturbed by the lack of synchronization between lunar and solar cycles.
>- it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected.
The paper actually discusses this in detail. The difference between this and prior lunar proposals is that they hypothesize:
1) what is being counted in lunar months
2) when the system is counting from
3) it supports this with a large amount of contemporary data on animal behavior.
If correct, this is an amazing demonstration of data transfer. It decodes basically 850 sets of observational animal behavior data recorded 30,000 on animal behavior years ago. It is like finding the notebooks of ancient scientists for an entire region.
Hm, I see no discussion about left-to-right vs right-to-left positioning of the ordinal Y in the (horizontal) sequences. Is left-to-right taken for granted?
Hopefully someone else can find more context in the paper on left-to-right vs right-to-left sequencing (or animal-facing-direction or towards-the-head(?)-of-the-animal or ? sequencing).
The most relevant quote in the paper I could find is
>Figure 4 presents the position of <Y> in sequences, by analytical taxa. To determine the position of <Y>, we assumed that sequences were oriented in the same way as their associated animal depictions, i.e. with the animal the right way up.
But I don't see how to get a directionality from that quote.
So the humans of late Pleistocene were behaviorally modern and made use of non-trivial codes for recording information over time. Graham Hancock is proven correct once again.
I can't tell if you're serious? I'll take your comment at face-value: Graham Hancock is not a trustworthy source. His "inspiration" is based on thoroughly discredited, white supremacist garbage. The fundamental thesis of his work is that: (1) white people have had civilization for (tens?) of thousands of years; and, (2) nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.
> ... nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.
Except that, e.g. the Dogon civilization is also many thousands of years old and had complex astronomical knowledge about extra-solar bodies which rivals that of modern times. There's nothing whatsoever about Graham Hancock's working hypotheses that's inherently exclusive to Europeans.
Graham Hancock's tone bothers me. it's far too much of "these traitorous archaeologists don't want you to know". but I've never seen any hint of white supremacy, or even remotely white-focused ideology. he seems to look for older civilisations pretty indiscriminately around the world. I'd say, if anything, he just likes a nice holiday
Why is it that he dismisses the ability of each of the native cultures (Mesoamerica, Egypt, China, ...) to have developed their own technology? His fundamental thesis is that they couldn't. That thesis comes from pseudoscientific 19th c. babble; that 19th c. work is for sure rooted in European exceptionalism.
last I remember, he was suggesting the first known agricultural peoples were influenced by survivor(s?) of some kind of lost civilisation in the Americas somewhere. what does that have to do with race?
do you think it's possible that you're seeing things through an overly racial lens?
The first link cites Fingerprints of the Gods, chapter 14 as racist, but doesn't give any quotations. I haven't read any of Hancock's books, and I have far better things to do with my time (apparently, among them, browsing HN).
If he's really making clearly racist statements, it would be good to see the quotes. If one needs to read the whole chapter to see the racism in some holistic interpretation, then perhaps there's a lot of ambiguity there.
I've seen video clips of Hancock here and there, and he strikes me as a smart guy who gets a kick of fooling average people. However, none of the clips I've seen seems racist.
Don't get me wrong. He strikes me as a bright guy who gets a kick out of (and if he profits, so much the better) fooling average people.
But, has he actually suggested or implied that European society was more advanced back then? Has he actually suggested or implied that this ancient advanced civilization was racially European?
The reason it took so long from anatomically advanced humans to create advanced civilizations, is that the progress of ideas is the slow painful task of churning and refining horseshit into slightly less shitty ideas.
Others have theorized that a European advanced society pre-existed the most advanced ancient civilizations, and that comes from racist European exceptionalism. However, that doesn't mean that all theories positing an undiscovered advanced ancient civilization are racist. Even if he draws (I have no idea here... I don't follow him) some of his ideas from those earlier racist theories, that doesn't make his theories racist unless he assumes or implies this undiscovered civilization was of European ancestry. If you follow any idea back far enough back in time, you eventually hit horseshit. Maybe the first horseshit you hit in this case is racism. It's possible that he refined the racism out of the previous horeshit and came up with a less shitty advanced ancient civilization theory.
Lots of modern medicine was full of racist horseshit more recently than the 19th century. That doesn't make modern medicine racist.
Again, I think he's wrong, and likely knows he's wrong. I just haven't seen anything to justify painting him as racist. (Though, I also haven't paid him much attention.)
Hancock is clever in that he works around a core idea that’s genuinely plausible and effectively impossible to disprove[1]
he takes the idea, and wraps it up in dramatic, grandiose language with an us-vs-the-establishment twang, adds a few extremely tenuous pieces of evidence, and sells it to the public
lots (most?) of these pieces of “evidence” are just geological/archaeological monuments conveniently located in exotic holiday destinations that he can get people to pay him to go and "study" - i.e. stand in front of and make ostentatiously-phrased claims, while presumably making diligent use of the 5-star resorts in the area
it’s a clever con, with little to no real harm, and I applaud him for it. Robert Schoch has taken a similar route, presumably realising that there's a lot more money in his PhD from broaching these ideas with the public than there is in analysing rocks
[1] - this being the idea that civilisation goes back [a lot] further than our current understanding suggests
Before I invest into reading the paper - does it say why precisely the hunters wanted to record the breeding cycles? Is this NOT to target the animals at that time or is it because they thought they would be easier prey?
> it seems far more likely that information pertinent to predicting their migratory movements and periods of aggregation, i.e. mating and birthing when they are predicably located in some number and relatively vulnerable, would be of greatest importance for survival
That's more or less the only relevant statement I found, but I didn't read the paper start to finish.
Yeah, we are not smarter than the folks that lived way before. We have way better nutrition, education, we live longer, we know about washing our hands before we eat. We must have way worse concentration on things, constantly distracted by (.. just a moment, got a text about the stock market), distracted by things, but they should have on the whole had the same capabilities as us. Nutrition and longer lifespan serve us well but it's really the knowledge built up over the millennia. Imagine those people in the late 1800s to early 1900s who figured out the elements, then eventually got to neutrons and protons, electrons.
Anyway, that person who lived 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, I think if you took their baby and put them in a modern family they'd probably be indistinguishable from a current baby (maybe some impact of nutritional deficiency from the parents?). They should have been able to ruminate about the world and develop ideas and make stupid farting noises just like us.
It would be exciting if this is true. I just can't get past the statistical analysis.
Has anyone else noticed that the fit functions in Figures 3, 4, and 5 of https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog... go right through the _centers_ of most of the histogram bins? It's pretty clearly a binned fit and the fit function is just picking a few bins to overfit to while ignoring the other bins. With so little data, it would be more robust to do a simple mean or median, rather than this misleading fit. Later, it looks like they're inferring p-values from the fitted parameters, which aren't going to mean very much.
Maybe the ultimate conclusions of this study are correct anyway. It just bothers me that the data analysis isn't justifiable as-is.
I think hunter gatherers had a far more regular diet than early farmers. By the middle ages in Britain most peasants were near starvation most of the year, but hunter gatherers avoided famine as they had a wide variety of food sources available.
For women who have low body fat it will be more irregular because of insufficient estrin provided by adipose tissue. A woman with poor diet and low body fat would be irregular.
Spring season is a time of abundance and fertility for plants and animals so I imagine Hunter gatherer societies had a better diet during spring and therefore women met body fat requirements for regular menstrual cycle and ovulation.
Maybe the 4 linear marks in the cave painting are for the 4 months after winter solstice and 14 dots are for days to ovulation after menses?
Probably because people mostly thought/talked about these images as aesthetic expression (or at least as signs of symbolic/notional thinking), not as something practical.
It is a well known fact that only $current_year humans are intelligent. All previous generations are violent and stupid. They are too busy clubbing themselves to even bother with the concept of time passing.
Don’t forget that if you see something in the archeological record that you can’t comprehend, there is always a reasonable explanation: it’s ritualistic woo-woo.
Not that you are necessarily wrong but... A hunter who wants to go out at night and needs to know when it will be light/dark. Ditto someone planning/expecting an attack on/by a neighbouring tribe.
Or really anyone with some free time and interest (not uncommon)...
Once you start counting time in lunar months it's an obvious move to divide the month in two halves, and then to do that again, and divide it into four.
I wonder how old the concept of a week actually is.
The 7 day week is a fairly modern convention; I believe popularized by the Christianization of Europe. The classic Roman "week" is 8 days. The Mayans (and most of mesoamerica) used a pair of interlocking 13 & 20 day "weeks". The Chinese used a 9 or 10 day "week" (xún).
-a man who wants to know if she's late
-a man who wants to be out hunting bison when she's likely to be grouchy
-a man who wants to be home from hunting when she's likely to be doubled over with cramps
-a man who wants to know when the moon will light up the night
-a man who wants to know when the night will be especially dark
Probably someone with imagination might be able to come up with a longer list of why a man would want to know a 28-day cycle....
> What man would need to track the 28-days cycle of the moon?!? [..]
I'm a man and I actually track the moon cycles. I go skiing in the mountains during winter. If it's a full moon, or nearly so, I can plan on starting in the evening. With snow it's easy to ski in moonlight.
If it's the wrong phase I can't plan on starting in the evening (typically Friday, for a weekend trip), I have to wait until the next day.
There are other activities here which requires moonlight as well. It's important. Where it's snow, moonlight makes all the difference. I always kept track of the moon, especially when I was in my late teens and went somewhere hiking or skiing every weekend.
I can easily imagine how super important moonlight would be for neolithic people, for all kind of activities, hunting and more.
I think that this is the paper mentioned in the linked article:
An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog...
The lead author is Bennett Bacon, corresponding to the "Ben Bacon" named in the BBC piece.
That seem to be it. They talk about compiling a database of cave art. I'd love to access that !
Good sir! I have setup a nice collection for you, please visit my NFT page blah blah, heh.
Can you imagine, scribbling on a cave wall, now your art is a NFT. Seem surreal, yet I bet someone is working on an NFT of that now.
The paper has a selection of images that convey the point much better than the article
Looking at these pictures my first thought was oh each line/dot must be like a full moon. But apparently it’s 1 line for each day?
Edit: this is interesting. Gonna bookmark to read in full later.
Thanks! Much more interesting. Some details of the paper's claims that I enjoyed:
- the system was stable over (i.e. their dataset covers) thousands of years
- it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected.
- they hypothesise a lunar calendar that begins with spring. It just kinda fizzles out during winter when there are no particularly interesting "dates". hus it isn't disturbed by the lack of synchronization between lunar and solar cycles.
>- it has been formerly proposed that these markings represent lunar calendar data but not generally accepted by scholars. No further details on difference from their proposal or why the former proposal was rejected.
The paper actually discusses this in detail. The difference between this and prior lunar proposals is that they hypothesize:
1) what is being counted in lunar months
2) when the system is counting from
3) it supports this with a large amount of contemporary data on animal behavior.
If correct, this is an amazing demonstration of data transfer. It decodes basically 850 sets of observational animal behavior data recorded 30,000 on animal behavior years ago. It is like finding the notebooks of ancient scientists for an entire region.
Oh right, I didn't pick up that those were the things that were unique. But yeah that makes sense!
Hm, I see no discussion about left-to-right vs right-to-left positioning of the ordinal Y in the (horizontal) sequences. Is left-to-right taken for granted?
Doesn't look like it. if you have a hypothesis, write it up and publish it
Hopefully someone else can find more context in the paper on left-to-right vs right-to-left sequencing (or animal-facing-direction or towards-the-head(?)-of-the-animal or ? sequencing).
The most relevant quote in the paper I could find is
>Figure 4 presents the position of <Y> in sequences, by analytical taxa. To determine the position of <Y>, we assumed that sequences were oriented in the same way as their associated animal depictions, i.e. with the animal the right way up.
But I don't see how to get a directionality from that quote.
So the humans of late Pleistocene were behaviorally modern and made use of non-trivial codes for recording information over time. Graham Hancock is proven correct once again.
He’s swung pretty hard for the fences on some big claims and that was far from one of the controversial ones
I can't tell if you're serious? I'll take your comment at face-value: Graham Hancock is not a trustworthy source. His "inspiration" is based on thoroughly discredited, white supremacist garbage. The fundamental thesis of his work is that: (1) white people have had civilization for (tens?) of thousands of years; and, (2) nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.
> ... nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.
Except that, e.g. the Dogon civilization is also many thousands of years old and had complex astronomical knowledge about extra-solar bodies which rivals that of modern times. There's nothing whatsoever about Graham Hancock's working hypotheses that's inherently exclusive to Europeans.
No they didn’t. The Dogon BS was debunked years ago:
Graham Hancock's tone bothers me. it's far too much of "these traitorous archaeologists don't want you to know". but I've never seen any hint of white supremacy, or even remotely white-focused ideology. he seems to look for older civilisations pretty indiscriminately around the world. I'd say, if anything, he just likes a nice holiday
Why is it that he dismisses the ability of each of the native cultures (Mesoamerica, Egypt, China, ...) to have developed their own technology? His fundamental thesis is that they couldn't. That thesis comes from pseudoscientific 19th c. babble; that 19th c. work is for sure rooted in European exceptionalism.
last I remember, he was suggesting the first known agricultural peoples were influenced by survivor(s?) of some kind of lost civilisation in the Americas somewhere. what does that have to do with race?
do you think it's possible that you're seeing things through an overly racial lens?
Nope. The actual archeological community has called him out over the years. I’m assuming he’s in it for the money.
Here’s Feagans about page:
I heard about Hancock pandering the show from Ed Barnhart’s podcast:
The first link cites Fingerprints of the Gods, chapter 14 as racist, but doesn't give any quotations. I haven't read any of Hancock's books, and I have far better things to do with my time (apparently, among them, browsing HN).
If he's really making clearly racist statements, it would be good to see the quotes. If one needs to read the whole chapter to see the racism in some holistic interpretation, then perhaps there's a lot of ambiguity there.
I've seen video clips of Hancock here and there, and he strikes me as a smart guy who gets a kick of fooling average people. However, none of the clips I've seen seems racist.
Don't get me wrong. He strikes me as a bright guy who gets a kick out of (and if he profits, so much the better) fooling average people.
But, has he actually suggested or implied that European society was more advanced back then? Has he actually suggested or implied that this ancient advanced civilization was racially European?
The reason it took so long from anatomically advanced humans to create advanced civilizations, is that the progress of ideas is the slow painful task of churning and refining horseshit into slightly less shitty ideas.
Others have theorized that a European advanced society pre-existed the most advanced ancient civilizations, and that comes from racist European exceptionalism. However, that doesn't mean that all theories positing an undiscovered advanced ancient civilization are racist. Even if he draws (I have no idea here... I don't follow him) some of his ideas from those earlier racist theories, that doesn't make his theories racist unless he assumes or implies this undiscovered civilization was of European ancestry. If you follow any idea back far enough back in time, you eventually hit horseshit. Maybe the first horseshit you hit in this case is racism. It's possible that he refined the racism out of the previous horeshit and came up with a less shitty advanced ancient civilization theory.
Lots of modern medicine was full of racist horseshit more recently than the 19th century. That doesn't make modern medicine racist.
Again, I think he's wrong, and likely knows he's wrong. I just haven't seen anything to justify painting him as racist. (Though, I also haven't paid him much attention.)
Hancock is clever in that he works around a core idea that’s genuinely plausible and effectively impossible to disprove[1]
he takes the idea, and wraps it up in dramatic, grandiose language with an us-vs-the-establishment twang, adds a few extremely tenuous pieces of evidence, and sells it to the public
lots (most?) of these pieces of “evidence” are just geological/archaeological monuments conveniently located in exotic holiday destinations that he can get people to pay him to go and "study" - i.e. stand in front of and make ostentatiously-phrased claims, while presumably making diligent use of the 5-star resorts in the area
it’s a clever con, with little to no real harm, and I applaud him for it. Robert Schoch has taken a similar route, presumably realising that there's a lot more money in his PhD from broaching these ideas with the public than there is in analysing rocks
[1] - this being the idea that civilisation goes back [a lot] further than our current understanding suggests
> Graham Hancock is proven correct once again.
Hancock is a fraud, and has never been proven correct over anything that I am aware of.
I would welcome corrections, by which I mean academic citations to falsify my statement.
Before I invest into reading the paper - does it say why precisely the hunters wanted to record the breeding cycles? Is this NOT to target the animals at that time or is it because they thought they would be easier prey?
> it seems far more likely that information pertinent to predicting their migratory movements and periods of aggregation, i.e. mating and birthing when they are predicably located in some number and relatively vulnerable, would be of greatest importance for survival
That's more or less the only relevant statement I found, but I didn't read the paper start to finish.
The latter. There was such abundance at the time that conservation probably never crossed a single mind.
Humans are literally the same now as they were then. They had calendars and they had memes and they had steve (nobody liked steve)
The only difference is that nobody has invented a way to live densely and share knowledge effectively enough to advance.
Yeah, we are not smarter than the folks that lived way before. We have way better nutrition, education, we live longer, we know about washing our hands before we eat. We must have way worse concentration on things, constantly distracted by (.. just a moment, got a text about the stock market), distracted by things, but they should have on the whole had the same capabilities as us. Nutrition and longer lifespan serve us well but it's really the knowledge built up over the millennia. Imagine those people in the late 1800s to early 1900s who figured out the elements, then eventually got to neutrons and protons, electrons.
Anyway, that person who lived 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, I think if you took their baby and put them in a modern family they'd probably be indistinguishable from a current baby (maybe some impact of nutritional deficiency from the parents?). They should have been able to ruminate about the world and develop ideas and make stupid farting noises just like us.
It would be exciting if this is true. I just can't get past the statistical analysis.
Has anyone else noticed that the fit functions in Figures 3, 4, and 5 of https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog... go right through the _centers_ of most of the histogram bins? It's pretty clearly a binned fit and the fit function is just picking a few bins to overfit to while ignoring the other bins. With so little data, it would be more robust to do a simple mean or median, rather than this misleading fit. Later, it looks like they're inferring p-values from the fitted parameters, which aren't going to mean very much.
Maybe the ultimate conclusions of this study are correct anyway. It just bothers me that the data analysis isn't justifiable as-is.
The last picture shows 14 dots - not any lunar cycle I know of.
I have to wonder, with a small sample what's the odds the dots and the reproductive cycle is just a coincidence?
Are the dots for days and it’s half a moon? That would be ovulation time for a human. I can’t make out what the drawing is.
hmmm... my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that ovulation in ancient times was much less regular due to diet.
I think hunter gatherers had a far more regular diet than early farmers. By the middle ages in Britain most peasants were near starvation most of the year, but hunter gatherers avoided famine as they had a wide variety of food sources available.
I don't have a source of this though!
For women who have low body fat it will be more irregular because of insufficient estrin provided by adipose tissue. A woman with poor diet and low body fat would be irregular.
Spring season is a time of abundance and fertility for plants and animals so I imagine Hunter gatherer societies had a better diet during spring and therefore women met body fat requirements for regular menstrual cycle and ovulation.
Maybe the 4 linear marks in the cave painting are for the 4 months after winter solstice and 14 dots are for days to ovulation after menses?
The Lascaux Caves have been known for 80 years. Wouldn't that be the first and most obvious hypothesis to test? Why only now?
Probably because people mostly thought/talked about these images as aesthetic expression (or at least as signs of symbolic/notional thinking), not as something practical.
It is a well known fact that only $current_year humans are intelligent. All previous generations are violent and stupid. They are too busy clubbing themselves to even bother with the concept of time passing.
Don’t forget that if you see something in the archeological record that you can’t comprehend, there is always a reasonable explanation: it’s ritualistic woo-woo.
(There should be a “Razor” for this)
What man would need to track the 28-days cycle of the moon?!? The first astronomers and calendarians were women....
Not that you are necessarily wrong but... A hunter who wants to go out at night and needs to know when it will be light/dark. Ditto someone planning/expecting an attack on/by a neighbouring tribe.
Or really anyone with some free time and interest (not uncommon)...
Tracking breeding cycles is more likely about sustainability. This might have been the precursor to cattle farming.
Once you start counting time in lunar months it's an obvious move to divide the month in two halves, and then to do that again, and divide it into four.
I wonder how old the concept of a week actually is.
The 7 day week is a fairly modern convention; I believe popularized by the Christianization of Europe. The classic Roman "week" is 8 days. The Mayans (and most of mesoamerica) used a pair of interlocking 13 & 20 day "weeks". The Chinese used a 9 or 10 day "week" (xún).
Genesis has a seven day week and was written down 1000+ years before Christianity came into existence.
But the Israelites probably got it from their Mesopotamian neighbors who had a 7 day week.
> What man would need to track the 28-days cycle of the moon?!?
A hunter of any gender who wants to know approximately when the animals migrate or give birth, would benefit.
Things that are easy enough for anyone to track and count:
day/night cycles
lunar cycles
annual summer /winter cycles
"four moons after the middle of winter" is therefor useful as it's possible to count, more easily so than "112 days after midwinter"
-a man who wants to know if she's late -a man who wants to be out hunting bison when she's likely to be grouchy -a man who wants to be home from hunting when she's likely to be doubled over with cramps -a man who wants to know when the moon will light up the night -a man who wants to know when the night will be especially dark
Probably someone with imagination might be able to come up with a longer list of why a man would want to know a 28-day cycle....
> The first astronomers and calendarians were women
You state it as if it were a fact.
Someone who hunts at night. My grandpa could always tell which lunar phase will we are at, despite never having periods.
> What man would need to track the 28-days cycle of the moon?!? [..]
I'm a man and I actually track the moon cycles. I go skiing in the mountains during winter. If it's a full moon, or nearly so, I can plan on starting in the evening. With snow it's easy to ski in moonlight. If it's the wrong phase I can't plan on starting in the evening (typically Friday, for a weekend trip), I have to wait until the next day. There are other activities here which requires moonlight as well. It's important. Where it's snow, moonlight makes all the difference. I always kept track of the moon, especially when I was in my late teens and went somewhere hiking or skiing every weekend.
I can easily imagine how super important moonlight would be for neolithic people, for all kind of activities, hunting and more.
Prior to the invention of fabricated light sources, the lunar cycle would be of interest to any humans that liked being able to see and walk at night.