The writing's on the wall

When you think about it, writing is pretty weird.

Honestly, language in general is odd enough.  Unlike (as far as we know for sure) any other species, we engage in arbitrary symbolic communication -- using sounds to represent words.  The arbitrary part means that which sounds represent what concepts is not because of any logical link; there's nothing any more doggy about the English word dog than there is about the French word chien or the German word Hund (or any of the other thousands of words for dog in various human languages).  With the exception of the few words that are onomatopoeic -- like bang, bonk, crash, and so on -- the word-to-concept link is random.

Written language adds a whole extra layer of randomness to it, because (again, with the exception of the handful of languages with truly pictographic scripts), the connection between the concept, the spoken word, and the written word are all arbitrary.  (I discussed the different kinds of scripts out there in more detail in a post a year ago, if you're curious.)

Which makes me wonder how such a complex and abstract notion ever caught on.  We have at least a fairly good model of how the alphabet used for the English language evolved, starting out as a pictographic script and becoming less concept-based and more sound-based as time went on:

The conventional wisdom about writing is that it began in Sumer something like six thousand years ago, beginning with fired clay bullae that allowed merchants to keep track of transactions by impression into soft clay tablets.  Each bulla had its own symbol; some were symbols for the type of goods, others for numbers.  Once the Sumerians made the jump of letting marks stand for concepts, it wasn't such a huge further step to make marks for other concepts, and ultimately, for syllables or individual sounds.

The reason all this comes up is that a recent paper in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal is claiming that marks associated with cave paintings in France and Spain that were long thought to be random are actual meaningful -- an assertion that would push back the earliest known writing another fourteen thousand years.

The authors assessed 862 strings of symbols dating back to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe -- most commonly dots, slashes, and symbols like a letter Y -- and came to the conclusion that they were not random, but were true written language, for the purpose of keeping track of the mating and birthing cycles of the prey animals depicted in the paintings.

The authors write;

[Here we] suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication.  We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months.  We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>.  The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies.  Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern.  We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means.  It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.

The claim is controversial, of course, and is sure to be challenged; moving the date of the earliest writing from six thousand to twenty thousand years ago isn't a small shift in our model.  But if it bears up, it's pretty extraordinary.  It further gives lie to our concept of Paleolithic humans as brutal, stupid "cave men," incapable of any kind of mental sophistication.  As I hope I made clear in my first paragraphs, any kind of written language requires subtlety and complexity of thought.  If the beauty of the cave paintings in places like Lascaux doesn't convince you of the intelligence and creativity of our distant forebears, surely this will.

So what I'm doing now -- speaking to my fellow humans via strings of visual symbols -- may have a much longer history than we ever thought.  It's awe-inspiring that we landed on this unique way to communicate; even more that we stumbled upon it so long ago.

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Art (pre)history

The human drive to produce beauty is a curious thing, and one that science has thus far been unable to explain fully.  No less a luminary than Albert Einstein highlighted this when he said, "It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."

Many of us -- most of us, I suspect -- feel at least some need to create.  I'm defining this in its broadest sense; I mean not only the most obvious examples of art and music, but abstract beauty in writing, the graceful fluidity of truly gifted dancers and athletes, and the simple, everyday enjoyment of gardening, crocheting, macramé, and all of the other dozens of creative hobbies we engage in.

I'm no stranger to this drive myself.  My primary outlets are writing and music, but I'm also an amateur potter.  I came to art rather late in the game, which is odd because both of my parents were talented artists -- my mother was an oil painter and porcelain sculptor, while my father made jewelry and stained glass windows.  I showed no aptitude for art while growing up, but on a lark (and mainly because my wife was doing it and encouraged me to give it a try) took a class in making wheel-thrown pottery about ten years ago.  I got hooked, and stuck with it despite the fact that such skills do not come naturally to me.  By this point I can turn out some pieces that are pretty decent even to my hypercritical and rather unforgiving eye.

A stoneware bottle from my most recent firing

The open question is why so many of us feel a compulsion to do these sorts of things.  That they serve no practical purpose has become something of a running joke between my wife and I; "I'm heading out to the studio, because heaven knows we need more pottery" is a phrase one of us utters on nearly a daily basis.

The facile answer ("'cuz it's fun") doesn't really explain very much, and although it's tempting to ascribe an evolutionary/selective rationale -- that art and music and so on foster social cohesion, perhaps, giving the group stronger bonds and a better chance of surviving through enhanced cooperation -- explanations like those rest on some pretty tenuous grounds.  The truth is we don't know, but given the ubiquity of creative endeavors, it's certainly a powerful driver whatever its origins and purpose.

And it has quite a significant history in our species.  Two recent papers have looked at different aspects of truly ancient art, and found that (1) the impulse to create art goes back at least fifty thousand years, and (2) our ancestors were motivated enough to create it that they were willing to undergo considerable hardships to do so.

In the first, which appeared in Nature this week, a team of archaeologists working at a site called Einhornhöhle in northern Germany found a deer bone engraved with what appear to be symbolic carvings (i.e. not just knife marks left by butchering).  The bone has been dated at 51,000 years old -- at which point that region of Europe was populated by Neanderthals.

So wherever this artistic impulse comes from, we apparently share it with our cousins.

The authors write:

While there is substantial evidence for art and symbolic behaviour in early Homo sapiens across Africa and Eurasia, similar evidence connected to Neanderthals is sparse and often contested in scientific debates.  Each new discovery is thus crucial for our understanding of Neanderthals’ cognitive capacity.  Here we report on the discovery of an at least 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx found at the former cave entrance of Einhornhöhle, northern Germany.  The find comes from an apparent Middle Palaeolithic context that is linked to Neanderthals.  The engraved bone demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent design, was present in Neanderthals.  Therefore, Neanderthal’s awareness of symbolic meaning is very likely.  Our findings show that Neanderthals were capable of creating symbolic expressions before H. sapiens arrived in Central Europe.

In the second, which appeared last week in PLOS-ONE, a team of researchers led by archaeologist Iñaki Intxaurbe of the University of the Basque Country (Leioa, Spain) decided to see what technical hurdles our distant kin had to overcome in order to create cave art.  Working barefoot while carrying torches made of juniper branches or carved stone lamps filled with animal fat -- a decent guess for the kinds of artificial lighting they might have used -- Intxaurbe and his team found that producing paintings in deep caves (like the ones at Lascaux, France and Armintxe, Spain) took some serious planning.  Torches give good lighting, but burn out quickly (an average of 41 minutes) and produce a lot of smoke.  Lamps are relatively smokeless but produce much lower illumination.  And each site presented different challenges because of issues like dampness, temperature, and airflow.

So whatever significance these paintings had -- whether they were some kind of representative ritual magic, or whether (like many of us) they simply felt driven to create -- we might never know.  But what seems certain is that we are the inheritors of a very, very powerful drive, and one that goes back at least fifty millennia.

Think about that next time you get out the knitting needles, paintbrushes, or clay.

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Becoming human

I think one of the uniting characteristics of the topics that interest me is that they all have something to do with altering our perception of the commonplace reality around us.

This capacity for (in writer Kathryn Schulz's words) "seeing the world as it isn't" led me to writing fiction, but also to the weird and counterintuitive bits of quantum physics, the expansive vision of astronomy, and the fields studying that which no longer exists -- history, archaeology, paleontology.  It's this last one that brings this whole topic up, with a pair of discoveries revealed this week that leave me kind of awestruck.

The first, which came my way from my buddy Andrew Butters over at the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math, is about the discovery in South Africa of a two-million-year-old skull of Paranthropus robustus, a hominin considered a "cousin species" that coexisted with our direct ancestor species Homo erectus.

The find is remarkable from a number of perspectives, not least that a complete skull of any hominin is pretty unusual.  "Most of the fossil record is just a single tooth here and there so to have something like this is very rare, very lucky," said Angeline Leece, who participated in the research.  She added an evocative description of what the world was like when the owner of this skull was still alive and loping around on the African savanna.  "These two vastly different species, Homo erectus with their relatively large brains and small teeth, and Paranthropus robustus with their relatively large teeth and small brains, represent divergent evolutionary experiments,"  Leece said.  "Through time, Paranthropus robustus likely evolved to generate and withstand higher forces produced during biting and chewing food that was hard or mechanically challenging to process with their jaws and teeth — such as tubers.  Future research will clarify whether environmental changes placed populations under dietary stress and how that impacted human evolution."

It's fascinating to imagine what the world was like to these creatures, during a time when there were several intelligent hominin species coexisting.  I remember my evolutionary biology professor making that point; a lot of our attitude that species are these hard-and-fast little cubbyholes comes from the fact that we have no near relatives still alive.  Much more common in the natural world are groups of closely-related species all competing and coexisting.

But it's still a little hard to picture wandering around the place and seeing other human-like, but not-quite-human, animals out there doing their thing.

It also bears keeping in mind that the other animal species they'd have been around weren't like the ones today, either.  This point was driven home by the second discovery revealed this week, of a twelve-thousand-year-old frieze of cliffside paintings in Cerro Azul, Colombia, that show not only the usual assemblage of South American animals -- snakes, alligators, turtles, bats, monkeys, porcupines -- but mastodons, giant sloths, camelids, and some sort of three-toed ungulate with a trunk.

"These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, who participated in the study.  "The paintings give a vivid and exciting glimpse in to the lives of these communities.  It is unbelievable to us today to think they lived among, and hunted, giant herbivores, some which were the size of a small car."

A small part of the Cerro Azul frieze

The size, scope, and detail of the drawings is phenomenal.  The paintings were made with ochre, a yellowish or reddish mineral, and cover the cliff face not only for miles horizontally, but for almost twenty meters vertically.  Whatever the purpose of this art -- whether it was purely decorative or had some kind of magical or symbolic significance -- the artists certainly were highly motivated.  Some parts of the frieze would have required ladders or climbing equipment to create, pretty impressive for what was at the time a more or less pre-technological society.

"These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed and fished," said archaeologist José Iriarte, also of the University of Exeter.  "It is likely art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.  The pictures show how people would have lived amongst giant, now extinct, animals, which they hunted."

I find it fascinating that even back then -- at the tail end of the last Ice Age, when merely surviving must have been a challenge -- people were creating art.  And the fact that much of that art was depicting animals no longer extant adds a whole other layer of mind-boggling to the find.  This, and the South African skull discovery, give us a window into understanding how we became human -- how we went from savanna-dwelling apes to intelligent beings who have art, music, literature, science, and technology.

It's a journey that took us from the East African Rift Valley to pretty much every point on the surface of the Earth -- and has driven us along the way to look with wonder into the unknown vastness of the universe.  As Carl Sagan so poignantly put it, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

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One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]