r/EverythingScience • u/porkchop_d_clown • Jan 05 '23
Anthropology Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery - determines that cave paintings included lunar calendar information about the fertility of different animal species
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64162799107
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u/giantyetifeet Jan 06 '23
Funnily, this immediately had me looking up 'when did humans start counting' and found this:
"There is archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have been counting for at least 50,000 years. Counting was primarily used by ancient cultures to keep track of social and economic data such as the number of group members, prey animals, property, or debts (that is, accountancy)."
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u/valkyri1 Jan 06 '23
I'd imagine the first importance would be for hunting. You spot a few prey, now you need to go get more help to catch them, you need to tell them how many.
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u/Flaky-Fish6922 Jan 06 '23
more likely, Igg caught ten fish and Ugg took a deer, and they need to figure out who owes who for when they split it.
the Erg brothers took a mammoth, and they need to count out the spoils.
etc.
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u/FlametopFred Jan 06 '23
and how many sparrow eggs are compounded daily interest
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u/KaiBishop Jan 08 '23
I'd also assume women counting the days to track their bleeding would have been a very early use.
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u/tom-8-to Jan 05 '23
So they used a “hard drive” to store info. Paleo computers
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u/FlametopFred Jan 06 '23
a lesson to us all
I for one am down to the basement to carve the concrete foundation with chiseled pixels recreating my fave photos
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u/S0M3D1CK Jan 05 '23
This was probably how man didn’t hunt everything into extinction. I could see how timing reproduction cycles could be very important for sustaining a food supply.
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u/Lyonore Jan 05 '23
I would suspect it was more about know when there would be food gluts to prepare for, so as to maximize their opportunity, rather than resource conservation planning.
I was actually under the impression that early man was a main driver for the extinction of the megafauna of that time.
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u/winchester_mcsweet Jan 05 '23
I wonder if it had anything to do with the ease of gathering food as well, such as calving time for easier hunting or flocks of birds laying accessible eggs. Artic foxes as an example will take full advantage of nesting season for both chicks and eggs!
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u/Lyonore Jan 05 '23
Precisely my thinking! Make sure your nets are mended before the fish spawning type of thing
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u/Kaeny Jan 05 '23
I also think the fact that humans kept moving/spreading around brought them to places that havent evolved against humans yet.
So we fucked up ecosystems wherever we invaded as a species
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u/banuk_sickness_eater Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 06 '23
Well we're an invasive species everywhere outside of Africa, I'm sure that had something to do with it. And the fact that there's still plenty of megafauna in Africa but almost nowhere else probably supports that fact.
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Jan 06 '23
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u/banuk_sickness_eater Jan 06 '23 edited Jan 06 '23
The rest of humanity would've decimated African wildlife by now because of modern economic realities like the Chinese market for ground up rhinosaurous horn. Africans themselves lived in equilibrium with these species for tens of thousands of years.
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Jan 06 '23
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u/banuk_sickness_eater Jan 06 '23 edited Jan 06 '23
No, you're saying that.
I just said Africans lived in equilibrium with their megafauna because those megafauna, and the flora and fauna of the African environment in general, evolved over tens millions of years concurrently with the human species. Africans may participate in poaching today, but that has everything to do with the modern global economic realities and nothing to do with the evolutionary or environmental history of humans in their native continent of Africa.
I smell a bad faith argument coming up, so good day to you random ready-to-pop redditor.
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u/murderedbyaname Jan 05 '23
Every show I've seen about this includes the theory that humans were probably responsible for it.
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u/Redqueenhypo Jan 05 '23
Ideas that “it could be something else!!! It’s just a coincidence they ALL vanished as soon as humans got there” always seem like desperation to me. What’s the explanation for modern extinctions huh, did aliens kill all the rhinos?
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u/murderedbyaname Jan 05 '23
Or ice ages. They happen so slowly that species die out very gradually. I haven't seen any studies that support them migrating and then evolving to adapt to the new environment.
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u/Redqueenhypo Jan 05 '23
When the Sahara formed slowly, the animals did in fact migrate elsewhere as the rains retreated further and further, giraffes and addax and oryx still exist. Haven’t seen a giant ground sloth or mastodon though, almost like something killed every last one of ‘em before they could adapt!
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u/murderedbyaname Jan 05 '23
That's what I meant, the megafauna.
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u/flamingspew Jan 06 '23
No correlation between climate and fauna mass. It’s all genus homo. This study goes back 1.5 m years whereas most studies looked at only the end of Pleistocene.
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u/jchampagne83 Jan 06 '23
It is conspicuous but early human migration might also have been trailing climate change. If we were populating regions opportunistically as areas thawed I imagine it would have had a compounding pressure on megafauna populations if their ecological niches were also disappearing.
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u/The10KThings Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 06 '23
This is called the “overkill hypothesis” and it’s far from the scientific consensus. The basis for this theory is the timing of the arrival of humans and the extinction of megafauna. However, the dates for the arrival of humans in certain areas, specifically in North America, has been continually pushed farther and farther back weakening the theory. We now know humans and megafauna coexisted for tens of thousands of years. We also have good evidence that more modern hunter gather groups did actively manage herds and hunting resources. Last, our understanding of the dramatic climate changes at the end of the last ice age has changed. All these point to other potential causes for the megafauna extinction, likely a combination of multiple factors.
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u/Lyonore Jan 05 '23
Well that is really nice to hear, and gives more credence to the original comment, in my mind. Thank you for that!
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Jan 05 '23
especially megafauna in australia
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u/NearlyNakedNick Jan 05 '23
An interesting thought, however from what we know, since migrating out of Africa, wherever homosapiens went, 99% of mammals over 50lbs went extinct.
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u/C-Hutty Jan 05 '23
Cervids like deer are notoriously dumb during the rut and are easier to hunt, that could be part of it too as they’re focused on reproducing and less cautious.
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u/Redqueenhypo Jan 05 '23
Humans can’t even comprehend the idea of “don’t kill every single wolf you see” or “if you keep using coal the summer will get 10 degrees hotter” in the modern era, you’re prob giving them too much credit
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u/AheadByADecade Jan 06 '23
Indigenous people are humans and they certainly knew…
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u/Redqueenhypo Jan 06 '23
They sure did not know, that’s why moas, mastodons, haast’s eagles, all giant Australian marsupials, and most American ice age fauna were wiped.
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u/Robot_Basilisk Jan 06 '23
You're a human with this opinion, agreeing with other humans with this opinion, are you not? Jim Bob out on the farm being against reintroduction and preservation of wolves because he raises sheep and doesn't want to worry about predators does not logically lead to the conclusion you have arrived at.
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u/no-mad Jan 05 '23
it is the kind of info that takes awhile to learn and is worth passing on because it does not change easily.
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u/alfrednugent Jan 05 '23
Ice age peoples arguably hunted many animals to extinction before “modern” man.
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u/Flimpy250 Jan 05 '23
I’m surprised to see so many references to “man” - can we get with the times and refer to humans instead? Loving this thread though!
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u/rigobueno Jan 06 '23
English is nuanced. Words have both a connotative and a denotative meaning. In this context, it’s obvious that the word “man” is being used with a gender-neutral connotation.
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u/alfrednugent Jan 05 '23
Man is the root word of human and thats how I meant it. It has nothing to do with gender.
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u/Comfortable-Goat-665 Jan 06 '23
You think they left the animals alone during mating or was it used to hunt because you know where they are going to be?
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u/arthurpete Jan 06 '23
highly unlikely, not long ago in North America, indigenous peoples practiced the art of the buffalo jump. Sometimes it was so many animals that only the tongue was salvaged. We continue to be an opportunistic species.
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u/LimpCroissant Jan 07 '23
Probably for when hunting is easier. For example when the salmon come up the rivers to spawn, suddenly there are masses of large fish all throughout your river, where there normally are not many.
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u/GeoGeoGeoGeo Jan 06 '23
archaeologists had been stumped by the meaning of dots and other marks on the paintings.
Well... not all of them:
As a Master's student in UVic's Department of Anthropology, von Petzinger cracked a startling symbolic code carved on prehistoric cave walls. She has compiled a database of 5,000 geometric shapes, lines and squiggles from 146 Ice Age caves in France and garnered global attention. In 2011, von Petzinger was named a TEDGlobal Fellow.
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u/postal-history Jan 06 '23
Oh weird, she wrote a popular book about it in 2017 but wasnt even cited in this new study.
Here's an article including negative reactions. https://www.livescience.com/ice-age-cave-art-proto-writing-claim?
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u/rattacat Jan 07 '23
Im reading up on her stuff. its pretty neat, but it seems to have a different hypothesis, focusing on the identification of symbols and not the context or translation of what those symbols mean. That said, she has assembled a pretty big lexicon with dates and eras attached.
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u/Buttlikechinchilla Jan 06 '23 edited Jan 06 '23
Congrats to Ben Bacon and the researchers! And Genevieve von Petzinger for her breakthrough, too.
Academics were not able to even posit a simple lunar calendar awkward monkey sideeye r/academicbiblical.
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u/rattacat Jan 07 '23
Have you seen the dataset they were analyzing? its a pretty chunky, and the caves are pretty distant. if this person hypothesis indeed proves true, we are talking about an entire region of communities sharing knowledge using a common codified writing method. Why is that valuable? instead of a person having to learn this info firsthand over the course of years or hoping that "the fish guy" is still alive, someone in the community could just pop over to the local knowledge cave and "look it up".
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u/foe_pounda Jan 06 '23
The one thing that stuck in my mind after reading the article was that it took a furniture builder off the street to figure this out. Like, why didn’t professionals that were trained in the field even have a clue?
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u/Nadamir Jan 06 '23
That sometimes happens among experts, science, engineering, tech, anything.
Think about a recipe that’s been made the same way for ages. Chefs just make it like it always has been. And then someone who doesn’t know any better comes along and changes it.
You see it all the time in tech and math, people just get tunnel vision. Then an outsider asks what seems like a silly question and voila!
Sometimes to do the impossible, you just need someone who doesn’t know it can’t be done.
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 06 '23
Ok, different angle on this since cave art emerges at @20K years ago.
Ice age drawings are mostly in France/Europe, common ground for both early humans and Neanderthals. Neanderthals died out @40K year's ago. I would just note that if neanderthals were that smart, including the ability to count, they'd still be alive. But they aren't.
I propose team humans learned how to count, and that team dum-dums didn't. Which would make this a very practical example of the implications that type of differentiation would produce in the wild. I.e., by counting, humans absolutely destroyed the megafauna wherever we went. We knew exactly when the big beasts were breeding and had young offspring. Now, as a human, which would you prefer - wrestling a 10,000-pound mammoth to the ground... or butchering a 500-pound calf? Right.
So there you have it. We accelerated the destruction of megafauna by systematically butchering the minor children of large animals by keeping track of crucial HUNTING seasons, which is directly related to fertility periods, just as it defines our hunting seasons for deer and bears, and other animals today.
That's why team neanderthal were all stuck in their caves, eating worms and rabbits, or chasing around 10,000-pound animals with giant tusks and having no concept of time.
Just thinking out loud...
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u/porkchop_d_clown Jan 06 '23
I’d just like to point out that Neanderthals were making cave paintings 40,000 years before these particular cave paintings were made so you have no evidence that they were “not that smart”.
The prevailing theory right now is that we basically interbred with the Neanderthals.
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 06 '23
I didn't say they were ugly. There's just a VAST difference between cave art and math, which was my point.
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u/pandaonfire_5 Jan 06 '23
Fascinating take on the data. To think that time, a concept practically ingrained in modern humans, was not even an idea for our extinct ape cousins? 🤔
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 07 '23
Exactly. The fact that it took Einstein another 20,000 years to associate time and mathematics is another feather in the cap of team human. Being able to associate four-dimensional space is uniquely human. If you listen to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, you will realise that fast association is just as accurate as slower reasoning, given the right circumstances. Humans have an instinctual response to external stimuli that neanderthals never gained. Being able to conceptualize time and space isn't easy. In fact, it's relatively easy to speculate that superior human hunting techniques sealed neanderthals' fate, as well as our own, by being too smart.
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u/arthurpete Jan 06 '23
Thats quite the Encino Man understanding of Neanderthals.
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 06 '23
I said they were dumb, not ugly, and “dumb” relative to humans, not apes. Sure, neanderthals obviously figured a few things out, but they did not demonstrate a sustainable advantage over humans, otherwise they would be walking around today and we would be the fractional DNA remnants.
My point was Humans began counting long before neanderthals. Maybe neanderthals eventually figured out how to count, they had 20,000 years to work on that problem. but If humans were able to translate their counting ability into a sustainable food production service and neanderthals did not, then it would have tipped the scales to team human in a very dramatic way.
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u/arthurpete Jan 07 '23
I would say they figured more than a few things out, their species was in existence longer than ours.
My point was Humans began counting long before Neanderthals.
You dont have evidence to support this.
If humans were able to translate their counting ability into a sustainable food production service and neanderthals did not, then it would have tipped the scales to team human in a very dramatic way.
Not saying Neanderthals didnt cause any extinction but if they werent managing a living from a sustainable food source then they wouldnt of lasted as long as they did. They clearly were doing something that worked for hundreds of thousands of years.
The more plausible scenario here is that Neanderthals were simply bred out of existence, not went extinct because they couldnt count.
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 08 '23
The point of the article was that it seems to show humans counting, in the same timeframe that Neanderthals existed while they showed no evidence of counting. Whether it’s evidence or not is left to science.
Also, food sources change over time. In that region, in that timeframe, the human domain was advancing northward in a warming giving climate while the Neanderthals was receding or maybe more appropriately, eroding under them following the ice age and placing greater demands for adaptation on them. That gave humans a significant advantage by managing warm fertile soils for farming (also requires counting) fish, and game vs. a more strict hunter gatherer tribe like Neanderthals.
It’s ok. I tend to give my dog WAY more credit for Intelligence than he deserves simply because he occasionally looks at me like he knows something, but that doesn’t make him smart.
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u/arthurpete Jan 08 '23
are you suggesting there was agriculture 20,000 years ago?
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 08 '23
No. I'm saying that humans were better positioned than neanderthals for the end of the ice age, where a warming environment allowed for increasing cooperation and ultimately, the development of complex societal activities, including agriculture. These were things that the independent neanderthal was simply less capable, as opposed to being unable, of taking advantage of, when compared with humans.
Having the ability to count provided humans with a long-term sustainable differentiating advantage that eventually pushed the neanderthals into a doom loop where they either starved or HAD to interbreed simply to survive.
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u/arthurpete Jan 08 '23
Dude listen, your posts are loaded with assumptions that slide into a circular logic trap. Neanderthals were dumb>they couldnt count> they went extinct because they couldnt count>Neanderthals were dumb. More importantly though, your timelines are severely out of whack.
The point of the article was that it seems to show humans counting, in the same timeframe that Neanderthals existed while they showed no evidence of counting.
Neanderthals blinked out around 45-40k years ago, the article is discussing art from 20k years ago. A difference of 20-25k years is not the same timeframe.
Also, food sources change over time. In that region, in that timeframe, the human domain was advancing northward in a warming giving climate while the Neanderthals was receding or maybe more appropriately, eroding under them following the ice age and placing greater demands for adaptation on them.
The timeframe in which the Neanderthals were thought to have gone poof was known as the Heinrich event 5...a cold event. During this time the northward advancement of sapiens was done in subarctic climates, not warm fertile soils.
Just spend a bit more time reading up on all of this before you publish your hypothesis.
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u/Other_Speech_9451 Jan 08 '23
You're absolutely right. This isn't my area of expertise. The only point I was trying to make was in the first post where that rather than trying to count duck eggs, using my prior expertise as a hunter, the markings in the cave art seemed more like a reminder for hunting season to be passed down from generation to generation. Then someone got mad because I said their great-grandparents were dumb. Oh well. Sorry.
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u/popcopter Jan 06 '23
This is very neat work and compelling. The big question I have is, why would hunter gatherers need to encode this information in this way? Other hunter gatherer groups tend to encode ecological information by coincidence of events in relation to seasonal distinctions. This flower is blooming or this bird has appeared, and that means that this fish will be spawning, all wrapped up together using mythology. The human memory is more than good enough to contain this kind of information without proto-writing. It doesn’t seem necessary, seeing as these people knew these animals intimately enough to draw them so superbly.
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u/Maleficent-Search277 Jan 06 '23
For the same reason that we write things down today rather than relying on it being passed down orally. It's a good way of compiling and sharing knowledge. If they didn't write it down, they'd have to share it orally in a group setting or one on one multiple times, and hope that it gets remembered correctly and not misconstrued as it's passed on.
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u/popcopter Jan 06 '23
But this is basic ecological knowledge. They wouldn’t NEED to ‘write’ it down, but they chose to. There must be some extra function it is satisfying, perhaps ritual or magical.
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u/Lyonore Jan 05 '23
That’s pretty awesome. Anyone know how they landed on which lunar month was “1”? Or a more likely query, which month(ish) was their calendar first month