When Humans Discovered Time with Ben Bacon and Dr. Tony Freeth

Transcript
0:00 · [sponsor ad text redacted]
1:33 · ... in today's episode John is joined by Dr
1:39 · Tony freeze and Ben bacon Dr Tony freeze is a founding member of the antacothera
1:46 · mechanism research project and an honorary senior research associate at University College London he holds
1:52 · degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University and Bristol University his
1:57 · work on the antecaithera mechanism has been published in the journal Nature as well as other prominent journals
2:05 · Ben bacon an amateur archaeologist and Furniture conservator in London
2:10 · meticulously examined ancient markings on cave paintings dating back 20 000
2:16 · years finding compelling evidence that they could be associated with a language teaming up with two professors from
2:23 · Durham University and one from University College London they embarked on a collaborative effort to decipher
2:31 · the significance of these enigmatic symbols Ben Pagan and Dr Tony freeze
2:37 · welcome to the program thank you for having us now one of my Fascinations both of you actually one of my
2:42 · Fascinations in life is ancient cave paintings because these are artistic
2:48 · Treasures that that just give a window into a Time long past much earlier in
2:54 · the history of homo sapiens yet it's still us that did that these magnificent
3:00 · walled paintings like atlasco where we can still tell what those animals are
3:07 · you know we know what an RX is even though the the actual natural form of it is extinct or an Irish elk or something
3:12 · like that we can see that and compare it to the fossil record and see that these people were you know actively watching
3:18 · and hunting these animals there's always been a mystery there's also Dots and a certain symbol that are associated with
3:25 · some of these cave paintings that I suppose everybody thought maybe that meant something but you have an idea on
3:32 · what they mean give us an overview of that there are many many many signs in
3:37 · the caves they're probably I mean they're Millions they're they're in the millions there are so many of them and I
3:43 · think they're under recorded or under reported there's study by the Specialists but when it comes to the
3:48 · public people see the paintings partly because they're so overwhelming and partly because they're so easy to
3:53 · process intellectually we can understand them instantly we make this instant connection with these people of the past
4:00 · and the study of we call the signs the words of the communication systems has
4:05 · generally been considered secondary to this but I think in the past five or ten
4:10 · years there's been quite serious interest in examining them
4:16 · seeing if we can find any patterns within that might indicate the communication of meanings and it's
4:22 · beginning to come to the Forefront there's there's our team that is doing this there's a team at tubing University which is trying to use computers and
4:29 · machine learning and pattern analysis using computer programs and then there's another new team starting up in France
4:36 · to do this I think we may have made a bit of a breakthrough because we can demonstrate that two very specific
4:42 · patterns which is a clear image of an animal an identical animal such as such as a horse as you just said together
4:49 · with what is generally three dogs is a temporal signature that is indicating something about the behavior
4:56 · of that animal and these patterns are so consistent across the caves that it is
5:01 · statistically probable that we're right that this is a form of seasonal recording of their behaviors and it's a
5:08 · shared system that they use which is very logical for hunter-gatherer people that they keep track of the animals so
5:14 · this is in a sense a scientific recording system keeping track of the animals knowing where they are when
5:20 · they're there what they're doing and it allows you to begin to plot out the world not using the seasons in terms of
5:27 · their warmth or their cold or whatever but using a a more scientific measurable
5:32 · system that allows you to be much more precise about what the animal is doing and also to record the information
5:39 · permanently to put these dots on the caves with the animal that then becomes a permanent record that's available not
5:45 · only to the person who made that image but to the community and to posterity into the future I think it's cognitively
5:52 · in interaction culturally I think it's quite important to chose a grasp of each other and grasp that you will be
5:58 · together in the future it's it's a cultural and Community thing as well as a scientific thing the lab book If you
6:05 · like this idea of a community thing you see these symbols geographically you know placed very distantly you know
6:11 · different caves still have these same sorts of things and they're adjusted perhaps you know for differences in
6:16 · latitude and differences in weather and it almost seems to me anyway and shoot me down if this is incorrect that you
6:22 · could have somebody from Spain that's migrating and they go you know North into France and they see a cave they can
6:29 · interpret that and know what to expect from the local Wildlife correct or not correct I think what you're saying is
6:35 · completely correct I think it's a bit more complex than that though I think that in a way if they if the person the
6:42 · the signs and the cave layouts the animals in the caves if they're local but the way of presenting them is
6:48 · universal so a person in Spain could go to say eastern Ukraine and be comfortable with the iconography
6:55 · there with the way the animals are drawn and a lot of the signs will be the same in fact most of the signs will be the
7:00 · same and we seem to have demonstrated that though the the time will vary and
7:07 · the latitudes will vary that a basic system of measuring the calendar from the time the snow melts or the rivers
7:14 · begin to flood in the warmth of spring is a constant used across this world which we can demonstrate so it shows
7:21 · that all these people share their information the signs the symbols if you like to call them that they're Universal
7:28 · as well they're they're I can't think of a region where they have their own unique vocabulary of signs the signs are
7:34 · used uniformly we've been studying a sign recently which is the lasting sign which is in use consistently from
7:41 · southern Spain southern Italy to Russia it's the same sign as the same meaning
7:47 · so there was great mobility and great exchange of ideas and culture I think intellectually and culturally and
7:54 · artistically Dr Faith here if you yeah I just like to say I think ever since the discovery of these extraordinary
8:00 · paintings in caves in the 19th century people in a sense have been blinded by
8:06 · the beauty of the artwork it is just stunning Ark and everybody who sees them
8:12 · they're just all struck by how beautiful the paintings are and this has blinded
8:17 · them to seeing what Ben is uncovered which is essentially the beginnings of
8:22 · science a scientific system I think that's really important and the other thing Ben touched on was the
8:28 · universality of this system over huge time frames from what 26 000 years ago
8:37 · to I don't know anyway huge time scales and huge geography from Southern
8:43 · latitudes to Northern latitudes and that there's a universal system
8:49 · tells us things about these cultures and societies which is completely
8:54 · mind-blowing I think it's a real revolution in how we see Paleolithic people now how vital was this
9:01 · information do you think to living in Europe of those ages would this have been life and death it was to do with
9:08 · survival certainly to do with survival and plotting the seasonal behaviors of
9:14 · animals because they relied on animals as prey was certainly to do with
9:19 · survival essential part of survival that's what the system is really about now Ben in your view just as a variant
9:26 · in this question is this the first glimmer of civilization this sort of interchange of information is this the
9:35 · beginning and I another scientist has has coined this phrase the beginning of the human data ohm the point at which we
9:41 · began to collect information and start passing it generation from to generation is this the beginning of society what I
9:49 · would say is we've probably always done that orally but the problem with any oral systems there's no record of it so
9:55 · we can postulate that these these people were always certainly doing this well before they could write it down but this
10:01 · is this marks the transition from an oral tradition only which is which is vulnerable oral Traditions are very
10:07 · vulnerable people having good memories and passing that information down accurately and you can painfully acquire
10:12 · information if that group of people dies out and the information dies with them but I think this is scientific because
10:19 · it records very specifically and very accurately and in a scientific way which
10:25 · is recorded at the time written down at the time so there's no going back in your oral tradition trying to think what
10:32 · happened last year or when and people start arguing about when things happen so I think this is the beginning of
10:38 · scientific data recording I think it has another value as well which is that it pulls the group together you're sharing
10:45 · are you're sharing a writing system it pulls you together there and that allows
10:51 · you to be more effective and more efficient human beings on their own are hopeless at Food Gathering especially in
10:57 · those hostile climates you need cooperation and critically you need to communicate your idea so you're acting
11:03 · in Harmony and I think that these do it when you put this information on a wall
11:08 · or on a rock you you are recording something that has happened but that's not its value what you're effectively
11:14 · saying is next year at this time at this cave this animal will be there in large vulnerable herds and we will attack them
11:21 · next year so that's quite a profound thing it's a concept of the future and of having a shared future with others
11:26 · it's quite extraordinary as you go into this just how broad the implications are
11:32 · both in terms of writing in terms of maths in terms of social interaction social grouping scientific recording the
11:39 · beginning of precise scientific recordings I think it's it's quite significant What's Happening Here can it
11:45 · be said that this is also this infers a level of Early Astronomy in other words in order to compile these they had to be
11:52 · watching the moon and know what the moon does as a calendar and that it shows
11:57 · that even at that early time anybody can notice a season but noticing the moon moving through the sky is a little you
12:03 · know that's a little bit different that that's science and astronomy right there I mean we obviously have to infer that right that these are lunar calendars if
12:10 · I answer this verse and then Passover to Tony what I think what is interesting about this is that the moon has no
12:16 · effect whatsoever on the earth and the temperature it's completely unrelated it's the Sun that has the effect on the
12:23 · earth and it's the sun really that you want to track but the sun proceeds too slowly to be of much use to these people
12:30 · and the idea of using the moon which is a much shorter unit it's it's a unit of
12:36 · 28 29 days which can then be subdivided into the phases gives you a very week by
12:42 · week quite accurate way of recording what you really want to record which is the Sun and I think this is genius that
12:48 · you can use something that's unrelated to what you want in order to make the thing that you want to understand
12:54 · comprehendable that's that's a big change in the world I think and over to you Tony you know the basic units with
13:02 · which ancient peoples must have reckoned time of the day the lunar month and the year because
13:10 · these are the evident changing astronomical phenomenon that they would have observed
13:15 · the problem with these is that they're not very compatible in terms of numbers there's
13:22 · 365.25 days in a year there's 29.53 lunar months in a year and so on
13:29 · so these are difficult in terms of reconciling the month of the year but
13:35 · they definitely must have used the lunar calendar when Ben first approached me it was because he knew that I'd done
13:42 · research on an ancient Greek astronomical calculating machine called the anti-kittler mechanism which
13:48 · includes a very sophisticated lunar calendar extremely sophisticated lunar
13:53 · calendar that works on a 76-year cycle subdivided into four 19-year Cycles I
14:00 · think Ben wondered if that sort of calendar might be included in these
14:06 · signs in the caves my own view was that this is the ancient Greek calendar is a
14:12 · mathematical calendar brilliant mathematical calendar based going back to Babylonian astronomy a bit earlier
14:18 · but that the Paleolithic peoples would really not have had access to this sort
14:24 · of calendar and this sort of sophistication mathematical sophistication and we had a lot of
14:30 · discussions about the calendar my own thought was that they reckoned these the
14:35 · the lunar cycle by simply observing the moon starting the month whenever it was
14:41 · convenient for them maybe at full moon or new moon or first crescent moon and then simply counting months as they
14:47 · happened in the sky because it's an easy thing to observe but they didn't try and fit the lunar month into the year their
14:55 · scope of Interest was the lunar months from what Ben is called the Bonsai zon
15:00 · the start of the start of late spring really to the end of the year and as as
15:05 · you go into winter there's no real animal behaviors you want to track so you sort of lose track of these months
15:12 · and then you simply start again next year that one without worrying about the
15:18 · incompatibilities between the lunar cycle and the annual cycle and the great thing this also does is that this
15:24 · calendar is based on months defined by by a meteorological calendar we we have
15:30 · a universal calendar where the first of May is the same you know whether you're in in Brussels or in Madrid you know but
15:38 · they had a calendar which started with some meteorologically based concept
15:44 · something to do with the change in the Sun's temperature as you move into into spring and the advantage of this is that
15:52 · that it's the meteorological calendar that determines the animal behaviors so
15:58 · it becomes a universal calendar regarding animal behavior that's why it works over such a huge range of latitude
16:06 · and altitude you don't suddenly get the numbers changing when you go to a
16:11 · northern latitude or to a high altitude because in those places the spring
16:17 · starts later so that you then start counting the lunar months at a later
16:22 · stage you know you're not talking about a universal calendar and so this I think explains why this these correlations are
16:30 · so extraordinary they are extraordinary correlations between the number of dots and lines for example on an animal
16:36 · behaviors they're just remarkable there's a there's an obvious logic to it
16:42 · when the cold ends and the animals start moving that's what's important to you in in that environment so it doesn't
16:47 · surprise me that you would begin counting from that and then in ignoring solar calendars and things like that
16:52 · that's different use but they I guess they may well have been aware of it now Ben could we have a sort of a bias here
16:58 · in other words maybe we're seeing a partial system we see the caves but we don't really have anything like carvings
17:04 · on trees or anything else they might have been using to create signposts of sorts do you think that that we only
17:10 · have a partial view of their total system so to speak I think so as think
17:16 · pretty much anything organic would clearly have brought it and I think they probably used wood or branches
17:21 · especially as counting sticks they put little notches in them to record you know day to day information but there is
17:27 · a surprising amount of there's not just the cave paintings which are which are great permanent things but there are
17:34 · enormous numbers of small rocks called piquettes which are basically small pieces of slate or Sandstone maybe the
17:42 · size of a a teacup sauce or something like that they're quite small and this
17:47 · is where the bulk of the information is recorded and very very densely so you'll have say on one of these small piquettes
17:54 · say the size of a small dinner plate you have an image of an animal and then you have quite dense patterns of Engravings
18:01 · around it and they will be recording information about that animal often over
18:07 · 10 or 20 years like when that animal came to that cave recorded over 20 years
18:12 · did the animal make there was it an aggregation ground arms was it a birthing ground is especially recorded
18:18 · in addition as well I think they're also recording other information such as what plans are available at that cave and
18:25 · possibly what rock resources are there so you need to think of it not just in terms of the cave wall but in
18:31 · collections of these piquettes which can often number thousands I figure from Paulo there's something like five
18:37 · thousand plaquettes that they've recovered from the cave floor which have enormous amounts of information on so as
18:45 · well as the cave walls you've got to think that there are hundreds of thousands of these small piquettes
18:50 · scattered over Europe that have survived and they're probably a minute fraction of what was created so the amount of
18:57 · information I think is much much greater than we realize and we know that the information
19:02 · recorded on these piquettes is correct because you will have a cave which will
19:08 · have a collection of briquettes with it say with rain pictures of reindeer on them for example these living caves
19:14 · would have living quarters with duplicates would be kept and then but they would also have Butchery sites with
19:19 · the remains of the animals would be kept and the archaeozuologists examined these
19:25 · bones in these these Butchery sites and they can tell you what what that animal is and when it was killed its time of
19:32 · death and we can then take that information put it against the pecans and that's her way of proving that the
19:38 · paquettes are recording real-time information about that cave because if the paquettes are recording for example
19:44 · that reindeer are there in say late Autumn the archaeologists if there are
19:51 · uh can find the reindeer heads and examine the teeth and say well actually this animal was butchered in late August
19:57 · the time of death is late almost so this is how we can structure a lot of our proofs by actually finding physical
20:03 · evidence that would have said on the piquettes about the animals is actually confirmed by the anaphymical examination
20:09 · of the remains now the symbol the the sideways y symbol that seems to be
20:15 · present in a lot of these tallies if you can call them tallies at records now this is interesting and in a sense that
20:22 · in Chauvet cave and in the traditions of Statuary during this period we see
20:27 · female forms and this obviously evokes Earth which would be very important for
20:33 · ancient peoples like this so that y symbol looks suspiciously like a
20:39 · birth symbol in that it's part of the legs essentially you know birth is that what what this is I mean is that just a
20:45 · very obvious representation of the cycle of life in order to tell people when these animals would give birth I think I
20:53 · think you're right and in fact I mean we use the Expressions Human animals and non-human animals so that we're
20:58 · separating out these images in the human animals you will often have a small statuette with that area of the body is
21:05 · clearly a y and it's been infilled with say red ogre Black Oak so they're clearly referencing uh human female's
21:12 · birth area but I think it's more complicated than that they they're recording time of birth but what is
21:19 · which is probably more critical is with the animals that are recording place of birth so animals will will not give
21:25 · birth randomly an animal go to the same Meadow in the spring and give birth there this is a constant pattern so if
21:32 · you know with one of the signs of working on at the moment is spawning grounds which obviously have y and these
21:38 · are recorded quite carefully and that's we think that's a vital food procurement
21:43 · sign they're marking these these sites and sporting sites and that is useful
21:49 · information you'll have large salmon there with millions of eggs within them and then they harvest them so it's
21:55 · meticulously noted all across Europe we have another idea we'll never know the
22:00 · exact derivation of wine we'll never know precisely I think your suggestion is is a very very sound one we also
22:07 · think that it might be a metaphor in that you have a single line with then divides and splits into two lines so
22:14 · that one line becomes two line one animal becomes two lines we think this is true because this occurs with some of
22:20 · the other verbs that you can deconstruct the graphic image and it will actually tell you what that that graphic engraved
22:27 · sign means the position I take is is maybe both of them are true they're both certainly probable and they certainly
22:33 · both have strong cases for them and birth is important to these people practically and culturally and I think
22:39 · that they have created this sign so early on it's like it feels quite logical especially as you say in the
22:45 · context of so many of the animals in the caves are females bursting with life often
22:53 · pregnant so why births the process of Life the transmission of life I think is
22:58 · is a vital part of this world it's a vital part of their culture as well as a practical part of their culture are
23:04 · there still unidentified symbols are there still things in these caves that you see that you just don't yet know
23:10 · what they mean yeah probably probably one or two hundred to be honest with I mean we're at the very very beginning of
23:15 · this I think it's fair to say that we are the first people that have attached meaning to any of these signs so we
23:21 · attach meaning to the dots and lines with the animals and demonstrated that is in all probability a lunar calendar
23:27 · and then we then use that lunar calendar to demonstrate that the sign wide almost
23:32 · certainly means to give birth but there are many others there there are there are dozens of others we're working on
23:38 · that and we've got a an idea about some of them but there are dozens and dozens that we simply have no idea what they're
23:45 · about but one thing I would say though is that if we don't know the the meaning of signs even if you don't know the
23:52 · meaning of sign you can make the logical conclusion that it's part of a communication system if it is used in
23:59 · consistent patterns of co-occurrence with several other signs and there are consistent patterns when we looked at
24:05 · say Linear B or other languages like that or ancient Egyptian we knew they were writing even though we couldn't
24:12 · read them because of the consistency of the associations within them and I think we're at the point now where we're
24:18 · beginning to see those consistent associations and it's a question of working through and putting a lot of
24:23 · work in and cracking them and working out what they mean but I think we're at the point now we pretty confidently say
24:30 · these are these are communication systems another common theme within caves and I know that Chauvet has a
24:36 · particularly interesting example of this is the human handprint and there it seemed to be the same human making all
24:43 · the handprints because there was a little deformation of the finger do you think these have symbolism or could these simply be the Advent of frivolous
24:50 · graffiti in other words I'm bored today I'm just going to make a bunch of hand prints do we have any any indication
24:56 · that these handprints which are often the only human Human type form we see in
25:02 · these caves other than obviously the animals could that mean something I think almost certainly I mean you're
25:09 · talking about the show today but all those handprints being made by one person but there are other caves where they are made by many many different
25:15 · people I think they have great meaning in that you know if you have young children of two or three and they're
25:20 · they're in the nursery one of the things they do is they put their hands into uh you know the watercolors and start
25:26 · smearing them on the walls it's a way of saying this is me this is this is my identity I'm leaving myself it's a way
25:33 · of almost making yourself permanent if you put your handprint on the wall that is always you on the wall I think that
25:40 · is probably what they're doing it's quite a profound thing it's a it's a sense of self and a sense of again a
25:45 · sense of the future again the sense that maybe you have an identity which is outside yourself that you put that hand
25:51 · print on the wall and someone else could come along and say oh that's so-and-so's handprint on the wall even though you're
25:57 · not there I think these are quite profound one thing that the paper came out recently in new scientists it came
26:04 · about three months ago we're a group of scientists at the French cnrs which is
26:09 · the French national Research Center have actually said that in a case such as gargas where you look at the full
26:15 · presentation of the hand you'll have various fingers withdrawn that this is actually some kind of communication
26:22 · system because they can demonstrate that of the 25 different possible
26:27 · combinations of fingers on one hand only 10 are used consistently so therefore 15
26:33 · possible combinations are excluded from this system and they don't know what this system means but they they think
26:39 · the evidence is mounting that these are indicating something maybe something about the person say you know I'm I'm a
26:47 · male I'm a female whatever it might be but I think I think there's meaning to
26:53 · what these people these people who I I think they go into the caves they leave their hand prints there for probably a variety of complex reasons and I think
27:01 · it shows that they have a grasp of the world Beyond themselves they grasp of the world beyond their immediate time
27:07 · and an understanding that their handprint on the wall might have significance to other people I think I
27:13 · think they're quite profound Daniel Prince yeah yeah my science fiction author side
27:19 · surfaces here in that um I imagine if we could pluck one of those people out of
27:24 · that time and bring them forward and take them to Los Angeles and show them the handprints of all of the actors and
27:30 · everything in front of the TLC Chinese Theater they would understand what the handprint meant and why it was there but
27:36 · they wouldn't understand the system of writing so they'd be in the same boat as you are looking at their hand prints
27:42 · right ice things indeffectively did the same thing so look I was here I'm leaving a permanent record I can't see a
27:48 · vast difference between the two they are effectively the same thing your hand in a way is you it's a it's a and if you
27:55 · put it into cement on a wall it's an external representation of you I think that you are identified I think it's
28:00 · very very good in analogy you mentioned a group that's using AI to try and untangle these symbols and their meaning
28:07 · you know I I artificial intelligence I'm fascinated by this because I know
28:12 · there's a lot of fears about AI but AI has produced some extra ordinary results in recent years I used to be a chess
28:20 · player very amateur one I should say but there's a chess program called Alpha
28:25 · zero that uses AI principles plays chess much better than human beings and very
28:32 · exciting chess it's not boring chess there's a there's a program called Alpha fold that predicts the folding of
28:39 · proteins from their DNA sequence which is a classic problem for human molecular
28:44 · biologists and they've often taken decades to decode a single sequence to
28:50 · predict it's how it folds and this will do thousands a day I believe you know so
28:56 · these these can be very powerful tools there's a recent thing I read about an
29:02 · AI system for diagnosing heart attacks because doctors often get this wrong and
29:07 · the the AI systems look like they'll be more accurate than the doctors based on
29:13 · the data so I'm quite interested in exactly what it seems consuming this is an area where AI might well make a
29:20 · contribution to how we understand all this this array of information and these
29:25 · associations that Ben was talking about but I answer that you might be interested in this Tony it's it's on the
29:32 · web it's called sign-based capital S capital B and they've been at work since
29:37 · about 2018 roughly and all their work is is on the website and you can look at it
29:43 · now their basic position it's a good group and what they've done is they have a Paleolithic person they have a
29:49 · computer person they have a linguistic person and they've got a couple of others so it's a multi-disciplinary
29:54 · which I think is the brilliant way to go about this now what they have done is
30:01 · they have not really made much progress because there's Ace we were able to work
30:07 · this out I think because we had the benefits of the calendar and the mathematics and the calendar doesn't exist that early so it's not picking up
30:13 · that pattern yet and the associations I think it will it will pick up it'll pick out the association between X and two
30:21 · parallel lines or X and one one line something like that but then you've got to move on to interpretation don't you
30:26 · you've got to then have some kind of intuitive flash or I think what we're doing is that we can work those out
30:33 · because they're often with the animals in the animal sequences which you can then which we can then demonstrate just
30:40 · see if it's the calendar is the basis of our proof I think which doesn't seem to
30:45 · be in a recognizable form before about 33 000 years ago see
30:51 · we have the calendar with the animal and I think if they have the calendar it exists in isolation so you can't really
30:58 · tell if it's a calendar and you can't tell it's context it's the combination of two obviously yeah I need a bit of
31:05 · nudging in that direction a little perhaps uh perhaps picking it all up you know I mean it only works on what it's
31:12 · given doesn't it really you know the information and data it's given so perhaps give it a little bit more of a
31:18 · nudge I think so and anyway it's just a rather speculative question so figuring
31:24 · out protein folding by an AI I had an AI guest on just last week
31:30 · that's Nobel Prize material the work that's being done with AI because of the complexity the extreme complexity of
31:37 · protein folding yeah Ben what initially LED you into looking deeply into this
31:43 · what was the spark that began your work I've always been interested in writing in Sumerian and story of Linear B and
31:51 · Alice coburg's great struggles I've always been interested in that and had actually tried to find the beginning of
31:56 · writing I could get no further back in the Sumerian like most people but about Debussy about seven years ago a woman
32:02 · called Genevieve Von betsinger wrote a book called The First Signs which made a huge sure I don't know if you came
32:08 · across it but it was uh I think it was it was the semi best seller in which she made reference to these symbols saying
32:15 · that the paleothic people had symbols had signs which that she put it quite correctly quite cautiously might be a
32:21 · form of communication I was completely unaware of these signs it's not something you ever encounter in
32:27 · linguistics or the semiotics I was Tony and I were with a professor of semiotics
32:32 · at UCL having lunch the other day and I went and saw him after our visit
32:38 · and I showed him you know I brought my computer and showed him these images and he was a linguistic Professor was
32:44 · completely unaware of these signs he was completely unaware of something like why for example he thought that the
32:49 · Paleolithic period consisted purely of very very beautiful paintings He was unaware of this much more complex aspect
32:55 · to it so when I saw Genevieve on pessinger's book and I saw that one of the patterns was the pattern of an
33:01 · animal with dots this immediately made me think of Sumerian where the first writing is considered to be a picture of
33:07 · a an animal saying goat or a fish or whatever with a number with it which is a basically an accountancy document that
33:14 · I'm going to send you 50 goats here's the word for goat here's the word for 50. so the the combination of an animal
33:21 · and a number is is that they think it's the braiding they started writing in
33:26 · Samaria and it appears to be the start of writing with the Paleolithic people or certainly one of the one of the
33:32 · beginning drivers of it so when I saw that I started going on the internet to looking
33:38 · at books you can see there's a very very common pattern I did based on something like 700 examples in the end which was
33:43 · collected by me in amateur with no knowledge of the field but it's very very quick it's very quick work to do in a way and then when you start working
33:50 · with the numbers you begin to use statistics and data analysis and various mathematical graphs to demonstrate that
33:57 · these numbers are not randomly distributed that they they're there's a clear patterns of Association and once
34:03 · you have clear patterns of Association you're away so it's kind of I sat down
34:08 · one evening looked at a book on the internet and within a week I was beginning to collect these for probably
34:14 · about six months later I went to see Tony to say this is going to sound an extraordinary and if it is and it's
34:20 · unbelievable please tell me but I think these dots are not random dots but they are numbers and they constitute a
34:26 · calendar and then Tony started guiding me and driving me forward at that point I think Ben was mostly self guys I
34:34 · should say but when he first came with these ideas my background was in mathematics and I just very quickly
34:41 · thought this is a significant breakthrough a real real breakthrough
34:46 · but it's come out of a huge amount of work by burn over what seven or eight years now I think it is and it's just he
34:55 · has immersed himself deeply in the subject like most scientists who do something significance they immerse
35:01 · themselves in a field of and then the intuitions and the insights come and I think that's what's happened with Ben
35:09 · now immersing yourself into a field have either of you gentlemen ever been inside
35:15 · one of these caves and directly looked at the cave painting and taken in the environment of what something of what
35:21 · the ancient peoples would have lived with as they painted these personally I haven't
35:27 · um I think I view myself as doing the semioptic work it's not about art I mean
35:32 · we look at I look at Art constantly I look at several thousand images of animals a week but basically what I'm
35:38 · trying to do the the approach that we used with the with the calendar of gathering 700 examples a large amount of
35:45 · data and then see what patterns demonstrate I think I'm doing that with everything so if I go to a cave uh
35:52 · there'll be a tour guide with me they'd be very poorly lit because they need to protect the images you you gather very
35:58 · little information what's on the internet I can I can look at 2 000 images a night and then I can you can
36:04 · compile quite complex and detailed databases from that we want to process as much data as fast as possible and the
36:12 · internet books are the tool for that going to a cave is slow and laborious and then we're not in a sense interested
36:18 · in atmosphere we want to work out what these things mean how these number patterns work I think a weakness of what
36:25 · has happened before is that people have gone to the caves have been blown away by the images and have forgotten to look
36:31 · at the rest in in great detail and great depth and great Detachment and that's I
36:37 · think working out of business is not necessarily a bad thing we also have the advantage that the the French and
36:43 · Spanish will send teams of 10 12 15 people into the caves to be led by
36:49 · senior professors they'll have assistant professors they'll have Imaging Specialists they'll have dating Specialists and they'll spend eight or
36:55 · ten years they'll publish a big thick book at the end of it with every object from that cave in there so you could
37:01 · examine the entire Corpus as one and get quite a clear picture of what went on in that cave and that I couldn't do that on
37:08 · my own that you know I can't spend 10 years in each cave and I don't have the special skills with imaging and drawing and
37:15 · dating that these people have it's best just to live off their work which is what we do which I think is is very
37:20 · sound it also removes me from interpreting the images yeah and that I think is important we have to be
37:26 · detached we have to be scientific if I went into a cave and came back with 700
37:31 · of my drawings with dots on them and showed them to Tony Tony could quite legitimately said well these don't have
37:37 · any scientific weight of Liberty because you've collected them and and in poor circumstances and you might be seeing
37:45 · just what you want to see but if you go with images that other people have done then that that removes that doubt it
37:51 · it's I think it's much sound and a way of working identifying confirmation bias is where I was getting because you've
37:57 · laid out in the paper that there is a lot of statistical things that are hard to ignore here that this appears to be a
38:03 · real effect rather than seeing what what one wants to see and that there actually is something solid here showing that
38:10 · they had a counting system my next question for you though is this we see animals is there any indicators you've
38:17 · seen of the life cycle of plants hunter-gatherers might they have painted a picture of a berry somewhere and said
38:25 · this is the month app you know or would they've just inherently known that this stuff is going to show up after the last frost or something like that that is
38:31 · that's just such a brilliant question and it was just such a snag with us because there's a lot of images of
38:37 · plants and a lot of images of plants with numbers and the numbers with the plants are very restricted it's 2 to 13.
38:47 · there are no other numbers outside that there are no outliers so we have a fantastic number pattern with the plants
38:52 · which is um the numbers we'll get will be typically two four and say something
39:00 · like seven eight which would correspond to early spring High summer and then say the foraging time later on in the Autumn
39:06 · so we have a fantastic number pattern there the problem is they're so bad at drawing plans that we don't know what
39:12 · the plans are we know they're plants and they're identified as as plants but we
39:18 · can't identify them accurately we can't say oh that's a bean or that's wild garlic or we can't identify a couple one
39:25 · of the ones we can identify is the white willow which gives up salicylic acid which is aspirin and that's got a spring
39:32 · marker on it which is when the salicylic acid is at its greatest concentration of
39:38 · strength in the white willow bark so that so we have this one great example but that's the only the ceiling plant we
39:43 · can identify it has a good number with it it's uh it's accurate in terms of Botany but you can't do it's a real
39:51 · frustration we need a we need a person who can identify plants from very very very bad Engravings to help us but it
39:58 · certainly appears that they were as conversant with plants and their life
40:04 · cycle as they were with the animals in their life cycle certainly I think it should be said that they weren't exactly
40:10 · vegetarians meet some animal products fish and so on
40:15 · with the essential components to their diet and and I think they celebrated animals I think the quality of the
40:21 · painting shows they celebrated animals in a way that maybe they didn't celebrate plants so much you know I
40:27 · suspect they were omnivores yeah I suspect uh you know a stress Community will eat whatever food is available you
40:35 · know and I think that they're probably very practical about that they'll gather knots they'll gather honey they'll gather salmon they'll go the reindeer
40:41 · but certainly I I don't know I don't know the percentages but certainly they ate enormous amounts of animals and they
40:48 · eat enormous amounts of animals that aren't often depicted like a lot of birds they ate 70 80 90 species of birds
40:54 · we know this from The Butchery sites and in terms of fish they eat dozens of dozens of different kinds of fish which
41:00 · again we know from Butchery science so they were they would you know if it was
41:05 · there they would eat it I think they eat a lot of small rodents hedgehogs and things like that this was very much
41:11 · about survival and we shouldn't forget that the period in of how long is the
41:16 · period been of the total thing 26 000 years or something well it starts about 43 000 years ago we've got our first
41:24 · marks 43 000 years ago yeah maybe our calendar coming in about 33 or 33 30 000
41:30 · and it ends about ten thousand years ago so it's a 33 000 year span yeah and and during that period there were huge
41:37 · climate changes you know they lived through ice ages they lived through warmer periods and they needed to
41:44 · survive in any way they could I mean the harshness of the the co-parents
41:49 · incredible that they survived to be quite honest and with the resources they have and it is all about
41:57 · survival and it's about adapting to your environment and you know as you said the environment may go from brutal ice ages
42:03 · to something that's you know relatively benign and relatively warm and you will have different animals and Flora and you
42:10 · have to learn to shift from say a mastodon or sorry Mammoth diet to a red deer diet and you have to shift from a
42:16 · certain group of plants to a new group of plants and from a certain group of fish and birds to a new group and they I
42:23 · think it shows our adaptability was one of the main reasons we survived they Paul Petit one of our colleagues wrote a
42:30 · book recently which he he noted that some of the species human species that
42:36 · died out probably died out because they were used to hunting one animal and when that animal disappeared they didn't have
42:42 · the adaptability to transition to new food resources and that effectively led
42:48 · to their end I think that'll also like to say that there's this is like a universal visual language
42:55 · across this huge time span and geography I don't think we know anything about their spoken language it seems to be
43:02 · Universal crossover geography where there must have been probably many spoken languages but this was yeah it's
43:08 · a bit like you know Chinese characters are read by people who speak Cantonese
43:13 · or Mandarin they speak them in a very different way but it's a universal Chinese character set you know and I
43:19 · think this visual language it was like a universal language whereas I don't think we know anything yet about their
43:26 · um spoken language and how they communicated with each other and how this system was communicated through
43:32 · generations and across geographies it's just it does blow your mind when you
43:38 · when you look at it I think Tony is right and maybe part of this system is
43:43 · to overcome the difficulties of these people speaking different languages they almost certainly did they probably have
43:49 · a different language every 50 miles or so that that was certainly the pattern say in France in the 18th century that
43:55 · Village is 50 miles apart we wouldn't be able to communicate with each other the dialects would be so yeah yeah yeah no
44:01 · this is quite striking it's um yeah and so that must have been true in this one the people in Portugal couldn't
44:08 · communicate with people in Russia but I think if it is like a series of airport signs where you can get on a plane in
44:13 · Portugal speaking Portuguese and land in in Bulgaria but you can still navigate the
44:19 · airport because you see the sign for exit for train for Customs for baggage reclaim it's a kind of uh some asiatric
44:27 · system where the the signs communicate their meeting visually well you could make the case that we we still did that
44:33 · up until relatively recently with things like ecclesiastical Latin being the universal language between scientists
44:39 · and correspondence and things like that or German for chemistry we have examples in our modern culture of doing that
44:46 · where you have a universal system but it doesn't have to be complex enough to be a language it's just a message instead
44:53 · right I think so and I think that's that's a very good you know that's a very very good point it might explain
44:59 · part of the iconography of the cave as well that if you if you look at these images as Tony has pointed out they are
45:05 · remarkably similar you would expect vast differences but they will draw the fish
45:10 · the same one of the one of the species we really focus on is fish because there are a lot of images of fish and fish
45:17 · evolves into quite abstract simplified signs if you like and these simplified
45:23 · signs are not local they're Universal across all of Europe and this
45:29 · simplification of the system this universality of the system allows these people not only to communicate with each
45:35 · other but to understand they have a shared culture if you go into a say a Christian Church pretty much anywhere in
45:42 · the world the language of that church is the same you'll have the the central aisle you have the altar you'll have the
45:48 · the crucifix at the end and that's partly a way of making you understand where you are immediately and I think
45:54 · the caves are partly about that as well that even we go into caves we we recognize that they have a similar
46:01 · layout and iconography and it's I imagine as well as being great art they're great
46:07 · cultural unifiers you feel at home with these people you know that you're the same as these people because you have a
46:13 · cave like this back where you come from I think it's fascinating because we do and they really do in some respects feel
46:20 · like Cathedrals these cave paintings they seem to fulfill a similar role because hunter-gatherers tend to place
46:28 · religious significance on that which they hunt so there's a certain reverence that seems to be present in the cave
46:34 · paintings but also a practicality but it works like a church because you know in
46:40 · medieval churches the whole point of the stained glass was to tell biblical stories again to telescope a message
46:46 · which has telescope for 2000 years as far as Christianity goes so it's sort of
46:52 · the same idea and it gives us an insight into the mind of people 42 000 years ago
46:58 · and I just still to this day find that absolutely amazing all right gentlemen
47:03 · we are out of time and I appreciate you both joining us for this discussion today and I hope I with further work
47:10 · you're able to figure out even more and come back we're working hard and
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