I love amateur sleuth detective stories, especially those sleuths like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple who used their intelligence and plain old-fashioned common sense to solve the mystery.
I also believe that humans are hard-wired to share key
information, especially back in the day when recording and sharing such data
was critical to survival. Knowing and planning for the timing of herd animal
and spawning fish migration patterns would’ve been critical for hunting these
food resources.
Now, according to the BBC, a London furniture conservator named Ben Bacon is being credited with deciphering the reason that Ice Age hunter-gatherers added dots and “Y”s to their cave paintings.
After studying hundreds of cave painting images and looking for repeating patterns, Mr. Bacon surmised that the number of dots associated with each image corresponded to one of the 13 months in the natural lunar calendar. He suggested that “Y” symbol represented the animals giving birth. So for instance, if you were hunting aurochs (ancient cattle) you would travel to their traditional calving grounds during the fourth lunar cycle to find them.
According to some researchers, this dot and dash code may actually represent our oldest written language.
What do
you think? Too far-fetched or is this blast from the past theory possible?
We humans do like to find patterns whether they exist or not. This one at least seems plausible.
ReplyDeleteMorning, Jim! I think we're wired to look for patterns too - if we identify a pattern maybe we can control it? Thoughts?
DeleteSharing information is important to us humans. No reason for it to be less important to earlier humans.
ReplyDeleteI agree - especially if it involved food. LOL.
DeleteInteresting. And “Y” not. It’s clear the cave drawings were meant for communication. To discover they are a written as well as pictorial communication makes perfect sense. And if the speculation is true, they were far better stewards of natural resources than we are. By the way, the fish looks like an ancestor of a snook. You can take the girl out of Florida, but… LOL
ReplyDeleteI also like how some of the images used natural bumps and curves in the cave walls to mimic musculature. That theory suggests that the images would 'move' with the flickering torchlight. These people used their imaginations!
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