Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs

WalterBright

They could also be simply idle doodling or decorations.

iberator

Ha! And someone today at HN laughed at the research of monkeys playing with crystals... Maybe one day we could communicate with monkeys with marbles and crystals and stuff as SIGN language. Imagine monkey soldiers becoming reality in AI WARS.

amatecha

The X's on the animal forms (Fig. 1B) ... isn't that likely to be "hit here" type markings, for hunting reference? Shoulder, side, stomach... surprised this wasn't really touched on in the paper, since it seems really likely. Though, the paper doesn't seem to care so much about the actual meanings, seemingly just narrowing down the number of possible interpretations /shrug

kazinator

> Humans have carved visual signs into the surfaces of mobile artifacts [...] And, undoubtedly, while doing so, some of them walked into something and got hurt.

ggm

Absolutely fascinating study. I look forward to more as the density of materials rises. I would observe that calligraphy such as in Islamic art, frequently conveys two messages. One is more abstract such as it's compelling beauty, but it can also be strongly representational. A word about swans in the shape of a Swan. So I don't see "it's just decoration" as a strong rebuttal. It may be decorative. It can also convey meaning.

dhosek

I remember in my literary theory class, one of the theorists made the (deliberately) absurd claim that writing preceded speech. Reading this, and I wonder if he was correct (as an aside, I tend to wander into the weeds in language articles on Wikipedia as I find myself increasingly curious about language evolution and I always wonder whether the different language families are “merely” a result of linguistic drift over millennia or whether human speech appeared independently in multiple points of origin).