# Did human ancestors write?



## Brian G Turner (Mar 16, 2004)

Here's a really interesting story:


*Early human marks are 'symbols'*

*A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour. *

University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings. 

But many researchers believe the capacity for true symbolic thinking arose much later with the emergence of modern humans, _Homo sapiens_. 

The 8cm-long bone was unearthed at the Kozarnika cave in north-west Bulgaria. 

Another animal bone found at the site is incised with 27 marks along its edge. 

"These lines were not from butchering; in this place (on the animal) there is nothing to cut. It can't be anything else than symbolism," Dr Jean-Luc Guadelli, of the University of Bordeaux, France, told BBC News Online. 


More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3512470.stm


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## littlemissattitude (Mar 16, 2004)

I think the scientists proposing this interpretation of the marks are going to have a hard time selling the scientific establishment on their ideas.  The fairly late date assumed for the origin of symbolic thinking (quoted at around 50,000 years in the article) seems to be fairly widely accepted.

Having said that, I think that the possibility that symbolic thought did arise much earlier than that is exciting and makes sense in some ways.  If the later date (50,000 years) is correct, it would mean that the capacity to produce fairly sophisticated imagery arose extremely quickly.  That just doesn't ring true for me.


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 17, 2004)

I really think we have a nasty habit - as a species - of demeaning anything that is not "us" and "now".


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## littlemissattitude (Mar 17, 2004)

I said:
			
		

> I really think we have a nasty habit - as a species - of demeaning anything that is not "us" and "now".


Which, I think, really gets in the way of an honest evaulation of the evidence of our ancestors and possible ancestors.  This is where cognitive archaeology comes in - trying to assess from material remains what level of cognition our ancestors were capable of very early, and exactly what they were thinking at various points in prehistory (and even in early history, where documentary evidence is either lacking or remains untranslated).  It's an iffy process.  How do you tell what sorts of things people were thinking by looking at the tools and other artifacts they left behind?

In fact, it is such an iffy proposition that some archaeologists reject the idea of cognitive archaeology altogether.  Their idea is that there is no way to know the kinds of things people were thinking in the past, so it is ridiculous to even try.  I'm not sure I share their dismissal of the process.  Obviously, there is no way to know what a particular individual was thinking when they did a particular thing that produced a particular piece of material remains.  However, I think it is quite possible to take the totality of an assemblage of artifacts and make some fairly educated guesses about the sorts of things people were thinking in a general sort of way.

More to the point of the article you linked to, I think we tend to assume that because our ancestors who lived a million years ago didn't look exactly like us, they couldn't possibly have been able to think anywhere near like us.  I mean, I had a social psychology teacher once who made the really incredible claim that humans as recently as the Middle Ages did not think like we do today.  The idea was that there was no real conception of the individual until then.  If there are those who don't think that people a thousand years ago or so were capable of thinking like we do today, why in the world would they think that our ancestors of a million or so years ago could think about anything at all in the abstract?  Just like I don't think we give babies and children credit for all the cognitive abilities they have, I don't think we give enough credit to our ancestors for their cognitive abilities.


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 17, 2004)

I quite agree - I find the whole concept quite dehumanising - almost fascist-like in it's application. We are superior people - everyone else was not properly human. When you think about how we apply the conept so widely to our past, present peoples, different stratas of society, and even the natural world around us, it can get pretty scary. The notion that you have to be a modern English-speaking human before your rights and abilities will be seriously considered is frighteningly ingrained in Western Reductionism, IMO. Of course, modern English-speaking humans are immune to the flaws of the very system of reductionist thinking: that sees any non-human denied acknowledgement of being able to perceive the world through some degree of consciousness...even though there is no working theory or acceptable model to even begin to explain what this very "consciousness" is that is quite agreeed is denied to all forms of being that isn't modern English-speaking human.

A short rant.


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## Jayaprakash Satyamurthy (Mar 18, 2004)

I have always marvelled at this lack of faith in humanity, if I may call it that. It's the same thinking that compels people to conjure all manner of far-fetched theories to explain, say, the Pyramids. 

I believe our ancestors were smart cookies. We are possibly more sophisticated and complex than them, but that is only because of the superstructure of culture and society around us - a structure those same, primitive ancestors worked towards creating. 

Who is the greater contributor to humanity - the first naked ape who made a bone tool and, possibly, scratched her personal marking on it, or a modern day hack like me churning out the verbiage for corporate clients?


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