These cavemen were men of letters?

Possible Cave “Proto-Writing” Challenges Slow Evolution of Human Consciousness

Denyse o'Leary  

London-based wood carving conservator Ben Bacon has, with academic colleagues, shaken up Ice Age paleontology by demonstrating that the marks on the 20,000-year-old cave paintings of animals found across Europe could be interpreted as a lunar calendar timing reproductive cycles:

Prof Paul Pettitt, of Durham University, said he was “glad he took it seriously” when Mr Bacon contacted him.

“The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar.” 

NEWS, “LONDONER SOLVES 20,000-YEAR ICE AGE DRAWINGS MYSTERY” AT BBC (JANUARY 5, 2023) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS.

Bacon had spent many hours both on the Internet and in the British Library, studying the paintings, looking for repetitive numerical patterns — something we would expect to find more often in a calendar than in other types of record-keeping. A collaboration took place among Bacon, two Durham University profs, and one from University College London then working out birth cycles for similar animals today. Thus, the BBC reports, “they deduced that the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals’ mating seasons.”

Of the 800 sequences of dots analyzed, no sequence contained more than 13 dots, which suggested to the researchers the 13 months of the lunar year. They also “found strong correlations between the number of marks and the lunar months in which the specific animal is known to mate.” (Live Science) The frequent “Y” sign was, they believe, connected to giving birth:

A Statistical Analysis

After conducting a statistical analysis of the database, Bacon and his colleagues were amazed to find that their lunar calendar seems to hold up well with the patterns.

“Overall, there is a remarkable degree of correlation between the numbers of lines/dots in sequences with and without Y and the position of Y and the mating and birthing behaviors of our analytical taxa,” the researchers said in the study. “Our data do not explain everything, but even taking imprecision and regional variability into account, the degree of support for our hypothesis is striking.” 

BECKY FERREIRA, “A TOTAL AMATEUR MAY HAVE JUST REWRITTEN HUMAN HISTORY WITH BOMBSHELL DISCOVERY” AT VICE (JANUARY 5, 2023)

Other researchers are not convinced, however:

Melanie Chang, a paleoanthropologist at Portland State University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that she agrees with the researchers’ assessment that “Upper Palaeolithic people had the cognitive capacity to write and to keep records of time.” However, she cautioned that the researchers’ “hypotheses are not well-supported by their results, and they also do not address alternative interpretations of the marks they analyzed.” 

KRISTINA KILLGROVE, “20,000-YEAR-OLD CAVE PAINTING ‘DOTS’ ARE THE EARLIEST WRITTEN LANGUAGE, STUDY CLAIMS. BUT NOT EVERYONE AGREES.” AT LIVE SCIENCE (DECEMBER 5, 2022)

The Big News

No doubt the paleontology community will be debating the exact significance of the marks for some time. For now, the big news is the fact that such ancient humans were apparently communicating via symbolic record-keeping as well as art ten thousands or more years earlier than we have thought:

It would be hard to overstate the magnitude of this discovery, assuming it passes muster in the wider archaeological community. It would rewrite the origins of, well, writing, which is one of the most important developments in human history. Moreover, if these tantalizing symbols represent an early calendar, they offer a glimpse of how these hunter-gatherers synchronized their lives with the natural cycles of animals and the Moon.

In short, if the new hypothesis is accurate, it shows that our Paleolithic ancestors “were almost certainly as cognitively advanced as we are” and “that they are fully modern humans,” Bacon told Motherboard. It also means “that their society achieved great art, use of numbers, and writing” and “that reading more of their writing system may allow us to gain an insight into their beliefs and cultural values,” he concluded. 

BECKY FERREIRA, “A TOTAL AMATEUR MAY HAVE JUST REWRITTEN HUMAN HISTORY WITH BOMBSHELL DISCOVERY” AT VICE (JANUARY 5, 2023)

The researchers, who plan further publications in this area, are careful to call their find “proto-writing” rather than “writing” because it simply marks seasonal patterns. If they or others were to find inscriptions or apparent histories, that would be an even more significant development.

The find certainly challenges the idea that human consciousness underwent a long, slow evolution in recent millennia. It was mainly the technology that evolved, it seems.

You may also wish to read: Why is Neanderthal art considered controversial? It makes sense that whenever humans started to wonder about life, we started to create art that helps us think about it. Science writer Michael Marshall reports that some researchers are accused of banning others from taking samples that would prove a Neanderthal was the artist.

Some more on the business of war.

 

An architectural icon examined.

The Chrysler building

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Lamarck's revenge?

 On Lamarck

Cornelius G Hunter

In the twentieth century Lamarckian Inheritance was an anathema for evolutionists. Careers were ruined and every evolutionist knew the inheritance of acquired characteristics sat right along the flat earth and geocentrism in the history of ideas. The damning of Lamarck, however, was driven by dogma rather than data, and today the evidence has finally overcome evolutionary theory.

Indeed there is much contemporary discussion, observations and critical analysis consistent with this position led by Corrado Spadafora, Yongsheng Liu, Denis Noble, John Mattick and others, that developments such as Lamarckian Inheritance processes (both direct DNA modifications and indirect, viz. epigenetic, transmissions) in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields now necessitate a complete revision of the standard neo-Darwinian theory of evolution or “New Synthesis " that emerged from the 1930s and 1940s.

Indeed, we now know of a “plethora of adaptive Lamarckian-like inheritance mechanisms.

””

Samuel Clarke on the trinity.

 Stanford Encycloedia

In his lifetime, Clarke was infamous for his view of the trinity, and he sparked a vociferous debate (Ferguson 1974, 59–149; Pfizenmaier 1997, 179–216). Clarke was not officially censured (but nearly so), but it surely prevented his rising to higher office. Clarke’s writing on the trinity are relevant for understanding his other metaphysical positions, especially his identification of “person” with intelligent, acting agent rather than with a particular substance, which has not been sufficiently reconciled with his account of personal identity as wrapped up with an immaterial soul.

In Christian theology, God is represented as tripartite—three persons but one God. In the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, in use in England during Clarke’s lifetime, one of the liturgies draws from the Athanasian Creed, which includes the following discussion of the Trinity: “For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one… So the Father is God, the Son is God : and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods: but one God.” In his position as a cleric, Clarke was required to subscribe to this formulation. In 1712, against the advice of his friends, he published The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, in which he diverged from what his opponents considered the plain sense of this formulation. The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity begins by collecting all the passages of the New Testament that relate to the Trinity. It then sets out a series of 55 propositions regarding the Trinity, each supported by references to the texts collected in the first section and writings from the early Christian church. However, the biblical texts do not primarily discuss God’s metaphysical attributes, according to Clarke, but ascribe dominion to God (W 4.150; Snobelen 2004, 265–275). The third section relates these propositions to the Anglican liturgy. This approach reflects Clarke’s general expectation that the correct theological doctrines are found in the Bible, are endorsed by the early church, and are compatible with reason. Through hundreds of years of what he considered bad metaphysics, the correct and intelligible doctrine of the trinity had become obscured, and Clarke hoped to return to a pre-Athanasian understanding of the trinity.

Clarke’s position in The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity was labeled by his opponents as “Arian,” “Socinian,” and “Sabellian.” Although they were commonly used as abusive terms for anyone holding non-traditional or anti-trinitarian views, they also have more precise meanings. An Arian holds that the Son (the second person of the Trinity) is divine but not eternal; he was created by God the Father out of nothing before the beginning of the world. A Socinian holds that the Son is merely human and was created at or after the conception of Jesus. A Sabellian holds that the Son is a mode of God. In the precise use of the terms, Clarke is none of these. Unlike the Arians, Clarke affirmed that the Son is co-eternal with the Father and not created (W 4.141). (Pfizenmaier 1997 provides further textual and historical arguments that Clarke should not be classified as an Arian.) From this it also follows that, contra the Socinians, the Son existed before the conception of Jesus. Unlike the Sabellians, Clarke denied that the Son was a mode of the Father. (This would have been very problematic given that he sometimes claimed that space is a mode of God.) Clarke’s claimed ignorance about substance made him reluctant to declare that the Father and the Son were the same divine substance, but the Son is endowed by the Father with all of the power and authority of the Father. He also called the manner of the Son’s generation from the father “ineffable.” So while Clarke denied that the trinity was a “mystery,” he did believe that the manner in which the Father’s power is communicated to the Son is “after a manner to us unknown” (Proposition 35; 4.159).

Clarke affirms that each member of the trinity is a person, but only the Father is self-existent, which means that the Father by essence (rather than by “office”) has a property that the Son does not. His views are best described as subordinationist but he could also be called a unitarian, in at least some senses of the term (Tuggy 2014; 204–205). See especially Prop. 25 (W 4.150); Prop. 27 (W 4.151); and Prop. 34 (“The Son, whatever his metaphysical essence of substance be, and whatever divine greatness and dignity is ascribed to him in scripture; yet in this he is evidently subordinate to the Father, that he derives his being, attributes, and powers, from the Father, and the Father nothing from him”; 4.155). To the Father alone are ascribed “independence and supreme authority” (Proposition 27; 4.151). Every other attribute and power that can be ascribed to the Father can also be ascribed to the Son, “but the titles ascribed to the Son, must always carry along with them the idea of being communicated or derived” (4.153).