This is junk science. The illustration is absolutely bonkers: https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/02/28230224/cavedoodles.jp...

It's literally a bunch of graphic design output showing clean font glyphs! Needless to say, there is no, I mean zero evidence of any kind of symbology of the fidelity being shown. You'll get a petroglyph here or there, and that's it. Stretching those across whole continents and inferring "language" is just ridiculous.

This is, like mid-tier video game art.

Well yeah, the illustration on some website (that may or may not actually be in her book) isn't scholarly evidence, that's true. But you're not giving her enough credit here, by a long shot!

1. She's been doing this since 2011, her TED talk a decade ago racked up 2M views, and this book landed a positive review from the curator of the Smithsonian's "hall of human origins"; she's not some rando. Here's her (somewhat outdated?) Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QaDkX_UAAAAJ

2. The actual evidence here is supposedly "a unique database that holds more than 5,000 signs from almost 400 sites across Europe". It could still be misleading of course, but it's a lot more than just a website diagram.

3. You putting "language" in scare-quotes is completely unnecessary, as that's not what she's arguing at all. Rather, she's saying that these symbols should be treated as a milestone on the way to written language ("first indicators of our human ancestors capacity for symbolic meaning"), not full grammars in-and-of-themselves. Given that evolutionary linguistics is in a "pre-Gallilean" phase at best (to quote Chomsky), I'd say any well-cited contributions to the field should be welcomed! Maybe she's wrong, but in a way that leads us to what's right.

I came to the comments to be dubious as well, so I appreciate where you're coming from. But IMO "ridiculous" is going way too far...

The uniform scale of the symbols is deceptive since the source drawings have substantially different sizes. The hand outline is hand sized, for instance.

TED sadly has a history of promoting pseudo-science, this one even got a standing ovation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwPoM7lGYHw

The illustration is of course just glyphs, but plenty of such symbols are found in e.g. paintings and stone and bone carvings. Not saying it's writing, but these kinds of symbols are not uncommon findings.

Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that Neanderthals were the intellectual equals of humans.