- Are cave paintings really little more than the testosterone-fuelled scribblings of young men? [2006]
Posted on 03/06/2005 3:20:58 PM PST by blam
Yeah, really... it could have been something just to pass the time. "As long as I'm cooped up in this cave for the winter, I may as well do something." Boredom. Could have been just graffiti. Why should things have changed? :')
The article / writer does not take into account the possibility that the paintings, engravings, statuary, etc.. were teaching or memory aids, meant to assist in maintaining the oral tradition... these symbols and drawings used to communicate those principles to the neophyte hunters. In a way, they are the first written language, precursor to pictographs and heiroglyphics.Another good possibility IMHO. The rebus concept may be at work, as it has been suggested in other, much less ancient pictures and inscriptions.
In her Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology, Mary Settegast reproduces a table which shows four runic character sets; a is Upper Paleolithic (found among the cave paintings), b is Indus Valley script, c is Greek (western branch), and d is the Scandinavian runic alphabet. On page 75 of the following title there's a quote from Allan Forbes and Thomas Crowder, source of the Magdalenian character set reproduced by Mary Settegast:Dancing girls and the merry MagdalenianThe people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire. And the essential preoccupations of this single market in ice-age art, it seems, were hunting and naked dancing girls... Paul Pettitt, of Sheffield University's archaeology department, said: "The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale." ...They would have kept in close contact, possibly through yearly meetings, with people in the middle Rhine, the Ardennes forest and the Dordogne. At the time it was possible to walk from Nottinghamshire to the Dordogne... The cave complex and attendant museum - where visitors can see iron-age stone tools found in the caves - now attract 28,000 visitors a year, bringing much needed income to the former mining village.
by Sean Clarke
Thursday April 15, 2004
Here's a quote from page 77:The Lost Civilization of the Stone Age"The proposition that Ice Age reindeer hunters invented writing fifteen thousand years ago or more is utterly inadmissible and unthinkable. All the data that archaeologists have amassed during the last one hundred years reinforce the assumption that Sumerians and Egyptians invented true writing during the second half of the fourth millennium. The Palaeolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic progression to civilisation is almost as fundamental an article of contemporary scientific faith as heliocentrism. Writing is the diagnostic trait, the quintessential feature of civilisation. Writing, says I.J. Gelb, 'distinguishes civilised man from barbarian.' If Franco-Cantabrians [i.e. Ice Age inhabitants of parts of France and Spain] invented writing thousands of years before civilisation arose in the Near East, then our most cherished beliefs about the nature of society and the course of human development would be demolished."
by Richard Rudgley
"Forbes and Crowder's justification for reviving the idea that writing may perhaps be traced back to the Ice Age is based on the fact that a considerable number of the deliberate markes found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages extending from the Mediterranean to China."Settegast's very brief discussion of Paleolithic runes, apparently an alphabet, which shares signs with the much later Indus Valley script, western Greek, and Runic or Baltic writing, is a bit daunting because it suggests that some kind of logographic, syllabic, or even alphabetic writing must be at least 12,000 years old, nearly three times as old as the known systems of hieroglyphics and cuneiform. From her book, p 1:
It now seems that this same Magdalenian culture had already harnessed the horse by 12000 BC, some 8000 years before the date assigned to the domestication of the horse in the conventional model...partially adapted and reprised from...
Macro-Etymology: Paleosigns [writing 20,000 years ago?]
Macro-Etymology Website | prior to May 20, 2005 | the webmasters thereof
Posted on 05/19/2005 11:00:18 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1406892/posts
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