> A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.

> So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language

Okay, so what's the bar for "written language" then?

The specialists in this field appear to be using some criteria for "written language" but it is not clear to me how that criteria might accept maths symbols or maybe roman numerals to indicate counters as a written language while discarding a notation system.

Personally, I would consider that any form of intentional knowledge transmission a "written language".

Scratch a line onto a rock each time you see a full moon? That's written language.

Paint handprints on a cave wall? That's written language too.

How does this discovery fail my criteria?

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denkmoon 3 days ago | parent [-]

Discovery doesn't fail your criteria, however I don't think most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language. Certainly doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

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lelanthran 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, for me the intention matters; is the intention communication (and yes, art is communication as well - it communicates the artists feelings at the time)?

If the intention is to communicate how many moons have passed, why is tally marks not considered written language?

We talk about the language of mathematics, and no one bats an eye, but tally marks still fall into the category of language of mathematics.

I am seeing the stated criteria as a distinction without a difference: The intentional mark `5` signifying how many moons have passed is somehow different to the intentional mark `|||||`, but no one is explaining what the difference is.

	▲	rcxdude 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think the linguists would consider arabic numerals on their own to be a language either. The main distinction, as I understand it, is having something like a grammar, i.e. a set of consistent rules about how to arrange the symbols to have meaning beyond just the sum of the meaning of each individual symbol. So no matter how you mark down your count, it's not language until you have some consistent pattern of signifying that that means how many moons have passed, or how many people are in the local community, or something like that.

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timeon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language.

How about emojis?

	▲	lelanthran 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language. > How about emojis? Goo question; those are literally to communicate :-/