The speaker, who studies ancient art, explores the origins of graphic communication by examining cave paintings and engravings from Ice Age Europe. These early artists left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, including geometric signs that appear across the continent, spanning 30,000 years. The speaker compiled a database of these signs and found that despite being created by different people in different locations, there are only 32 distinct signs, which is a surprisingly small number. These signs were likely meaningful to their creators and may have been used for communication, potentially representing things like counting marks, stylized representations of objects, or even celestial bodies. The speaker suggests that these early artists were building the foundation for later writing systems, which emerged around 4,000-5,000 years ago. The invention of graphic communication marked a significant moment in human history, allowing for the preservation and transmission of messages beyond a single moment and place in time.
Here are the key facts extracted from the text:
1. The Ice Age was a time when towering ice sheets dominated Europe, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra.
2. Over 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across Europe, decorated with animals, abstract shapes, and humans.
3. The earliest rock art found in Europe dates back to 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
4. The majority of the rock art found in Europe features geometric signs, which outnumber animal and human images.
5. There are only 32 geometric signs found across the 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe.
6. These signs repeat across both space and time, with some signs staying in use for the entire time period.
7. The repetition of the same signs for so long and at so many sites suggests that the artists were making intentional choices.
8. The geometric signs may have been used as a system of communication, but they are not a full writing system.
9. The earliest systems of graphic communication in the world, such as Sumerian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the earliest Chinese script, emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago.
10. These early systems of graphic communication likely originated from earlier protowriting systems made up of counting marks and pictographic representations.
11. The geometric signs from Ice Age Europe are unlikely to be truly abstract written characters, but rather may have been used as counting marks or stylized representations of things from the world around them.
12. Some researchers have begun to ask questions about the meaning of certain signs at specific sites, but a comprehensive re-examination of the signs is needed.
13. The creation of fully developed writing systems was an impressive feat, but it built upon something much older, with its origin stretching back tens of thousands of years to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe.
14. The idea of making a graphic mark and forever changing the nature of how we communicate originated deep in our collective history, tens of thousands of years ago.
15. A database of all known geometric signs from rock art sites was compiled to study the signs and their distribution.
16. Fieldwork was conducted at 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal, and Sicily over the course of two years to document and study the geometric signs.
17. New, undocumented geometric signs were found at 75% of the sites visited during the fieldwork.
18. The geometric signs found in Europe show a surprising degree of similarity to those found in other parts of the world, such as Indonesia and Australia, especially in the 30,000 to 40,000-year range.
19. The invention of graphic communication may have originated from a common point in Africa.