Posted on 03/12/2012 9:25:34 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Not surprisingly, these paintings attract tens of thousands of visitors every year. However, there is another aspect to this art that often escapes attention, but which is now providing scientists with fresh insights into our recent evolution. Instead of studying those magnificent galloping horses and bisons, researchers are investigating the symbols painted beside them.
These signs are rarely mentioned in most studies of ancient cave art. Some are gathered in groups, some appear in ones or twos, while others are mixed in with the caves' images of animals. There are triangles, squares, full circles, semicircles, open angles, crosses and groups of dots. Others are more complex: drawings of hands with distorted fingers (known as negative hands); rows of parallel lines (called finger flutings); diagrams of branch-like symbols known as penniforms, or little sketches of hut-like entities called tectiforms. In total, 26 specific signs are used repeatedly in these caves, created in the millennia when Europe descended into -- and emerged from -- the last great Ice Age... the symbols provide clear evidence of the way our ancestors moved from representing ideas realistically -- as in those beautiful images of bisons and mammoths -- to the stage where they began to represent concepts symbolically. In some cases, signs appear to emerge from the use of truncated images of an animal and eventually come to act as a symbol for that animal in its entirety. For example, a wavy line used to depict the back of a horse in a larger painting eventually comes to stand for the entire horse in different sets of paintings.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Some of the symbols found to recur among Palaeolithic cave paintings and other artefacts. Photograph: Genevieve von Petzinger
Do they follow the -45° frequency distribution of language?
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.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield. |
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Ya stumped me.
Analysis of Letter Frequency Distribution in the Voynich Manuscript
http://csp2011.mimuw.edu.pl/proceedings/PDF/CSP2011250.pdf
And the Bronx only looks/acts like it’s prehistoric. ;’)
This article would have particularly interested my Dad. He got irritated with the anthropologists who insisted the petroglyphs found in Arizona were just “doodles” made by ancient Indians. He firmly insisted they were conveying real information to each other.
Shaka brah! Just hang loose.
Have you seen David Talbot's "Symbols of an alien sky" videos yet? A lot of those "doodles" were drawings of high-energy plasma discharges that apparently were witnessed worldwide by ancient peoples. Absolutely fascinating videos. You can find them on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH7lrjixaNA
Thanks!
Hey, Hey, Hey. I live in the Bronx.
I think your Dad was correct.. they were marking their hood
much as is done nowadays by the denizens of the barrio with their placas.
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