An ancient, common language?

[theletch1]

Found this linked to a site I was browsing and wanted to get other opinions on it.

Over the last several years, similar petroglyphs have been identified on as many as five continents. They all date from roughly the same time-period. In the late 20th century, archaeologists discovered a collection of symbols carved in stone as petroglyphs in the Negev desert of Israel that appeared to be writing. Dating of these symbols showed that they were made over an extended period time, beginning around 1700 BC.

Here's the full story.

I'd be very curious to know how this happened given the technology of the day and the distances involved.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Don't know but if Newton and Leibniz can come up with calculus independant of each other at roughly the same time I guess anything is possible.

That or it was one guy named Sid that that REALLY like to travel that was playing a joke on the ages

 

[exile]

You have to be careful with this sort of thing... I'd like to see a few more assessments of the material from a few different sources. I'd like to see just who has done the dating, what their methods were, what the 'slop' margins were, and so on. The thing is, calculus was in a sense an idea whose time had come, and it was the idea, not the notation, that Leibnitz and Newton shared. They actually used rather different symbolic representations of derivatives and integrals. When you get identical symbols widely separated in geographic distance, supposedly all simultaneous... well, it could be bona fide... or it could be not. I'd just like a bit more background literature on it.

 

[Ray]

It was my understanding that branches of the human spoken languages have convergence, for example the indo-european branches, etc. It was a theory that all spoken human have/had a common ancestor language and diverged...just as all humans had a common ancestor.

In written language we can guess at some "universal" symbols that many societies would adopt and adapt: Circle, square, a line (vertical or horizontal), cross, x. variants of the circle become phi (or the cyrillic "f"), How about combining some of those universal symbols: A circle with a square in it; a circle with a cross or plus sign. Eventually, we might get advanced enough to actually draw a stick figure of a person.

So I would be surprised if most societies (that draw pictures or pictographs or have a pictoglyph writing system) would use many common symbols. But I'll bet there are also novel ones when comparing two divergent societies.

 

[Xue Sheng]

The thing is, calculus was in a sense an idea whose time had come, and it was the idea, not the notation, that Leibnitz and Newton shared. They actually used rather different symbolic representations of derivatives and integrals.

Yes it was... so this means it ONLY could have been Sid

 

[arnisador]

When you get identical symbols widely separated in geographic distance, supposedly all simultaneous... well, it could be bona fide... or it could be not.

Yeah, using a symbol like | for the numeral '1' and || for the numeral '2' are frequently re-invented because it's so natural, but seeing a Greek ksi on five continents would be a bit more convincing!

 

[Sukerkin]

I'll have a look at the linked background in a minute but I just wanted to throw into the mix the rememberence of the fact that at one point in our past the human race came within a hairs breadth of becoming extinct. Genetic estimates are that there were as few as 10,000 individuals left, from a previously much faster 'pool'.

I recall this from an old Horizon documentary (British science series that, at one time, used to dig a lot deeper than it does now) which was looking into the commonality of catastrophy legends.

 

[theletch1]

I'll have a look at the linked background in a minute but I just wanted to throw into the mix the rememberence of the fact that at one point in our past the human race came within a hairs breadth of becoming extinct. Genetic estimates are that there were as few as 10,000 individuals left, from a previously much faster 'pool'.

I recall this from an old Horizon documentary (British science series that, at one time, used to dig a lot deeper than it does now) which was looking into the commonality of catastrophy legends.

I remember that near extinction from a History channel show over here in the states, Mark. Super volcano or some such. The thing that got me, though, was the era that the glyphs are supposed to be from. Our commonality would go back much, much further than that time period so there would have been millenia for language to diverge. I read some of the comments at the bottom of the article and there was one that pointed to a much more in depth look at this phenomenon. I'm fascinated by this sort of stuff but nowhere near educated enough to truly debate it.

 

[exile]

Yeah, using a symbol like | for the numeral '1' and || for the numeral '2' are frequently re-invented because it's so natural, but seeing a Greek ksi on five continents would be a bit more convincing!

Yes, that's the sort of thing I had in mind. In cases like this, it's crucial to evidence for authenticity. The last thing archæology needs is any more Piltdown Men or Kensington Runestones...

 

[Steel Tiger]

Well won't this fire up the Creationists? Or maybe the Atlantis guys will jump on this. Then there are the Civilisation One people, they would love this.

But really all I'm seeing at the moment is a commonality of shapes, one group of which has been suggested has a correlation to a pre-Canaanite script.

There are all sorts of problems with dating petroglyphs as we found much to our embarrassment here is Australia about 15 years ago. A set of Aboriginal petroglyphs were dated to 136 000 BP, an astounding discovery! Then it was found that the dating material which was weathered parts of the rock had been significantly contaminated so the dates were invalid. Its hard to date rocks without good context, and like Exile I would like to know the error in dating from all the sites. They may barely overlap.

There is no doubt, I think, that humanity shares considerable commonality. Genetics has indicated that all modern humans descend from a group from South Africa about 160 000 BP. But these glyphs are supposedly only 4000 years old, at the oldest. I know that the inhabitants of the Pacific islands were great mariners and sailed vast distances, and I don't think it is unreasonable for someone to travel from Europe or Africa to the Americas with ancient technology, but I am still sceptical of the common language suggestion. I am fairly confident that no Australian indigenous languages have similarities to Canaanite or Hebrew, they all show those characteristic signs of being very old languages, unlike Canaanite or even Negev.

 

[Sukerkin]

Forgive my leaky memory, ST because I know we've touched on this before and you had some valuable input to correct my misconceptions but wasn't there a case made that the Aborigines are a different sub-species altogether (because of certain fundamental differences in skull shape as far as I recall)?

 

[Steel Tiger]

Forgive my leaky memory, ST because I know we've touched on this before and you had some valuable input to correct my misconceptions but wasn't there a case made that the Aborigines are a different sub-species altogether (because of certain fundamental differences in skull shape as far as I recall)?

I think that some people would very much like this to be true, but it isn't. The Aboriginal people appear to show closer links to the sub-continent than to southeast Asia. It's difficult to see these days because of the almost complete infiltration of Indo-Aryan morphology throughout the sub-continent. Morphologically speaking there are great similarities between Australian Aboriginals, the peoples of Papua New Guinea, the southern parts of the sub-continent, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Morphology is a tough subject, however, like linguistics. The determining factors are difficult to pinpoint and the whole subject has been thrown into staggering disgrace by the 19th century use of shape to determine humanity. If you didn't look European you weren't really human.

We are a strangely sensitive species really. We don't like to think of ourselves in the same terms as other animals - genera, species, subspecies. There have been throughout our evolution some 23 recognised homonoid and homonid species, but only one is extant today. The different skins colours that have evolved to deal with environment would, in dogs, be called breeds. Dogs come in all different shapes and sizes but can easily interbreed, so they are one species, or more specifically subspecies (Canis lupus familiaris). We come in different shapes and colours and we can easily interbreed, so we are one species according to the classical definition of a species anyway (genetic research is changing the definition of species somewhat).

 

[exile]

There are all sorts of problems with dating petroglyphs as we found much to our embarrassment here is Australia about 15 years ago. A set of Aboriginal petroglyphs were dated to 136 000 BP, an astounding discovery! Then it was found that the dating material which was weathered parts of the rock had been significantly contaminated so the dates were invalid. Its hard to date rocks without good context, and like Exile I would like to know the error in dating from all the sites. They may barely overlap.

It's true, rock is particularly difficult to date. You have to use potassium/argon dating (where you compare the proportions of K-40 to the Ar-40 that K-40 decays into). Radiocarbon dating is probably more accurate for geologically recent dates, but has the disadvantage of not working that well with, um, inorganic materials (due to the lack of C in inorganic substances, lol). So if you want to get the dating on a chunk of plain ol' rock, basically, it's K/Ar or nothing. And the problem is that you might wind up with significant heterogeneity internal to the sample. To rule this possibility out, you'd have to apply the tech directly to the areas covered by the writing, taking a number of samples; but this would at least partially destroy the petroglyph, so it wouldn't be allowed. That's why I'd like to know exactly what the methods used were. Because, as ST notes, there's a good chance that you may be dealing with incommensurable findings here, due to the dating slop. That's one of the big problems with petroglyph dating. There are ways around it (Ar/Ar dating, e.g.) but they are very delicate and a lot can go wrong... that's the reason why I was urging caution in accepting the numbers here at the outset.

 

[Steel Tiger]

I've been thinking about this some more and it brings me back to something I am always astounded by - the translation of newly discovered texts. Champollion's work on Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Ventris & Chadwick's work on Linear B (Mycenaean) are amazing. I just wonder if the symbol set in this case was larger enough to come to the conclusions that have been drawn?

On another point, when I studied archeolinguistics (looking at the influence of Nahuatl on the native languages of US southwest) I noticed a lot of lone words and borrowings. I can see a similar situation occurring with the closer sets, but I am still perplexed by the American and Australian examples.