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There's something about caves.
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A shadowy opening in a limestone
cliff that draws you in.
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As you pass through the portal
between light and dark,
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you enter a subterranean world.
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A place of perpetual gloom,
of earthy smells, of hushed silence.
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Long ago in Europe,
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ancient people also entered
these underground worlds.
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As witness to their passage,
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they left behind mysterious
engravings and paintings.
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Like this panel of humans, triangles
and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain.
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You now walk the same path
as these early artists.
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And in this surreal, otherworldly place,
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it's almost possible to imagine
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that you hear the muffled footfall
of skin boots on soft earth,
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or that you see the flickering of a torch
around the next bend.
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When I'm in a cave,
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I often find myself wondering,
what drove these people to go so deep?
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To brave dangerous and narrow
passageways to leave their mark?
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In this video clip,
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that was shot half a kilometer,
or about a third of a mile underground,
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in a cave in Spain,
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we found a series
of red paintings on a ceiling
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in a previously unexplored
section of the cave.
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As we crawled forward, military-style,
with the ceiling getting ever lower,
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we finally got to a point
where the ceiling was so low,
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that my husband
and project photographer, Dylan,
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could no longer achieve focus
on the ceiling with his DSLR camera.
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So while he filmed me,
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I kept following the trail of red paint
with a single light,
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and a point-and-shoot camera
that we kept for that type of occasion.
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Half a kilometer underground.
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Seriously.
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What was somebody doing down there
with a torch or a stone lamp?
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(Laughter)
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I mean -- me, it makes sense, right?
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But you know,
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this is the kind of question that
I'm trying to answer with my research.
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I study some of the oldest
art in the world.
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It was created by these
early artists in Europe,
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between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago.
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And the thing is
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that I'm not just studying it
because it's beautiful,
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though some of it certainly is.
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But what I'm interested in
is the development of the modern mind,
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of the evolution of creativity,
of imagination, of abstract thought,
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about what it means to be human.
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While all species communicate
in one way or another,
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only we humans have really
taken it to another level.
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Our desire and ability
to share and collaborate
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has been a huge part of out success story.
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Our modern world is based on a global
network of information exchange.
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Made possible, in large part,
by our ability to communicate.
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In particular, using graphic
or written forms of communication.
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The thing is, though,
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that we've been building
on the mental achievements
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of those that came before us for so long,
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that it's easy to forget that certain
abilities haven't already existed.
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It's one of the things
I find most fascinating
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about studying our deep history.
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Those people didn't have the shoulders
of any giants to stand on,
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they were the original shoulders.
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And while a surprising number
of important inventions
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come out of that distant time,
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what I want to talk to you about today
is the invention of graphic communication.
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There are three
main types of communication,
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spoken, gestural --
so things like sign language,
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and graphic communication.
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Spoken and gestural are,
by their very nature, ephemeral.
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It requires close contact
for a message to be sent and received.
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And after the moment
of transmission, it's gone forever.
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Graphic communication, on the other hand,
decouples that relationship,
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and with its invention,
it became possible for the first time
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for a message to be
transmitted and preserved,
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beyond a single moment in place and time.
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Europe is one of the first places
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that we start to see graphic marks
regularly appearing
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in caves, rock shelters,
and even a few surviving open-air sites.
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But this is not the Europe we know today.
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This was a world dominated
by towering ice sheets,
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three to four kilometers high,
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with sweeping grass plains
and frozen tundra.
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This was the Ice Age.
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Over the last century,
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more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites
have been found across the continent.
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Decorated with animals, abstract shapes,
and even the occasional human.
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Like these engraved figures
from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily.
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They provide us with a rare glimpse
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into the creative world and imagination
of these early artists.
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Since their discovery,
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it's been the animals that have received
the majority of the study.
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Like this black horse
from a cave in Spain.
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Or this unusual purple bison
from La Pasiega.
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But for me, it was the abstract shapes --
what we call geometric signs,
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that drew me to study the art.
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The funny this is, that at most sights,
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the geometric signs far outnumber
the animal and human images.
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But when I started on this back in 2007,
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there wasn't even a definitive list
of how many shapes there were,
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nor was there a strong sense
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of whether the same ones
appeared across space or time.
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Before I could even
get started on my questions,
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my first step was to compile a database
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of all known geometric signs
from all of the rock art sites.
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The problem was that while they were
well documented at some sites,
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usually the ones
with the very nice animals,
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there was also a large number of them
where it was very vague --
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there wasn't a lot
of description or detail.
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Some of them hadn't been visited
in half a century, or more.
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These were the ones
that I targeted for my field work.
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Over the course of two years,
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my faithful husband Dylan and I
each spent over 300 hours underground,
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hiking, crawling and wriggling
around 52 sites
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in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily.
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And it was totally worth it.
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We found new, undocumented geometric signs
at 75 percent of the sites we visited.
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This is the level of accuracy
I knew I was going to need
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if I wanted to start answering
those larger questions.
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So let's get to those answers.
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Barring a handful of outliers,
there are only 32 geometric signs.
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Only 32 signs
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across a 30,000-year time span,
and the entire continent of Europe.
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That is a very small number.
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Now, if these were random
doodles or decorations,
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we would expect to see
a lot more variation,
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but instead what we find
are the same signs,
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repeating across both space and time.
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Some signs start out strong,
before losing popularity and vanishing,
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while other signs are later inventions.
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But 65 percent of those signs stayed
in use during that entire time period.
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Things like lines, rectangles
triangles, ovals and circles.
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Like we see here,
from the end of the Ice Age,
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at a 10,000-year-old site,
high in the Pyrenees Mountains.
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And while certain signs
span thousands of kilometers,
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other signs had much more
restricted distribution patterns,
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with some being limited
to a single territory,
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like we see here
with these divided rectangles
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that are only found in northern Spain,
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and which some researchers have speculated
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could be some sort
of family or clan signs.
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On a side note,
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there is surprising degree
of similarity in the earliest rock art
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found all the way from France and Spain
to Indonesia and Australia.
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With many of the same signs
appearing in such far-flung places,
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especially in that 30,000
to 40,000-year range,
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it's starting to seem increasingly likely
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that this invention actually traces back
to a common point of origin in Africa,
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but that I'm afraid,
is a subject for a future talk.
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So back to the matter at hand.
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There could be no doubt that these signs
were meaningful to their creators,
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like these 25,000-year-old
bas-relief sculptures
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from La Roque de Venasque in France.
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We might not know what they meant
but the people of the time certainly did.
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The repetition of the same signs,
for so long, and at so many sites
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tells us that the artists
were making intentional choices.
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If we're talking about geometric shapes,
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with specific, culturally recognized,
agreed-upon meanings,
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than we could very well be looking
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at one of the oldest systems
of graphic communication in the world.
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I'm not talking about writing yet.
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There's just not enough
characters at this point
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to have represented all of the words
in the spoken language,
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something which is a requirement
for a full writing system.
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Nor do we see the signs
repeating regularly enough
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to suggest that they were
some sort of alphabet.
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But what we do have
are some intriguing one-offs,
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like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain,
known as "The Inscription",
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with its symmetrical markings on the left,
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possible stylized representations
of hands in the middle,
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and what looks a bit
like a bracket on the right.
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The oldest systems of graphic
communication in the world --
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Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs,
the earliest Chinese script,
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all emerged between 4,000
and 5,000 years ago,
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with each coming into existence
from an earlier protosystem
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made up of counting marks
and pictographic representations,
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where the meaning
and the image were the same.
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So a picture of a bird would really
have represented that animal.
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It's only later that we start to see
these pictographs become more stylized,
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until they almost become unrecognizable.
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And that we also start to see
more symbols being invented
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to represent all those other
missing words in the language --
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things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives.
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So knowing all this,
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it seems highly unlikely that
the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe
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were truly abstract written characters.
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Instead, what's much more likely
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is that these early artists
were also making counting marks,
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maybe like this row of lines
from Reparo de Za Minica in Sicily,
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as well as creating
stylized representations
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of things from the world around them.
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Could some of the signs
be weaponry or housing?
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Or what about celestial objects
like star constellations?
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Or maybe even rivers, mountains,
trees -- landscape features.
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Possibly like this black penniform
surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs
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from the site of El Castillo, in Spain.
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The term penniform
means "feather-shaped" in Latin,
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but could this actually be
a depiction of a plant or a tree?
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Some researchers have begun
to ask these questions
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about certain signs at specific sites,
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but I believe the time has come
to revisit this category as a whole.
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The irony in all of this, of course,
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is that having just carefully classified
all of the signs into a single category,
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I have a feeling that my next step
will involve breaking it back apart
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as different types of imagery
are identified and separated off.
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Now don't get me wrong,
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the later creation
of fully-developed writing
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was an impressive feat in its own right,
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but it's important to remember
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that those early writing systems
didn't come out of a vacuum.
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And that even 5,000 years ago,
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people were already building
on something much older,
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with its origins stretching back
tens of thousands of years --
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to the geometric signs
of Ice Age Europe and far beyond,
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to that point, deep
in our collective history,
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when someone first came up with the idea
of making a graphic mark,
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and forever changed the nature
of how we communicate.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
Emi Kamiya
Corrections:
5:11 - 5:14
The funny this is that at most sites --> The funny "thing" is that
8:39 - 8:41
than we could very well be looking --> "then"
10:13 - 10:17
maybe like this row of lines
from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, --> "Za Minica"
http://www.mammasicily.com/za-minica-cave.html
Thanks!