[Flick Lives]

Yes, the development of the abstraction of sounds to a symbol was an amazing breakthrough in human development, wasn’t it? We had probably hit the end of the road in development with pictographs and the next leap in civilization required a symbolic phonetic language.

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Interesting too there is no “primitive” form of hieroglyphics; just there they are in all their complexity. Always wondered if the ancient Ancient Egypt was founded by survivors of some antediluvian culture perhaps thousands of years older.

[Covenantor]

Well don't the figurative cave paintings pre-date hieroglyphs?

And we still don't have a real clue what they really represent...just one human's urge to record beauty of what he saw; a catalogue of game to be found in the area, with hunters/spotters pointing to image to identify specific game seen; animist hoo-doo; mama's shopping list?

Were these concurrent with developing vocal languages? Imagine visting Og and having him point to an image, what would that convey? Umm pretty...umm me hungry...taste good, hard to kill, umm warm skin....or something else?

This photo clearly shows the human scale of those paintings which always puzzled me. See how high up they are and how wide the horned beast is... how did they get up there in the dark? Even with modern illumination it is frikkin dark.