40k-Year-Old Symbols in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope of the Claim vs. Evidence

  • Many commenters argue the article (and headline) overstates the case by calling the marks “earliest written language.”
  • The core empirical work is seen as: cataloging thousands of recurring abstract signs across hundreds of Paleolithic sites, not demonstrating a full writing system.
  • Some defend the researcher’s seriousness (large database, peer-reviewed work) but note that popular presentations and infographics oversell it.

Writing vs. Symbols vs. Notation

  • Repeated distinction:
    • Symbolic art (any meaningful mark),
    • Proto-writing / notation (e.g., tallies, calendars, accounting marks),
    • Writing proper (systematic mapping from marks to elements of language, with grammar and large symbol inventory).
  • Linguists in the thread stress that known languages need far more distinct units (phonemes, syllables, words) than the small set of cave signs, and that long, coherent symbol sequences from one time/author are lacking.
  • Examples like cuneiform and Egyptian are used to illustrate a trajectory from pictograms and numbers → proto-writing → fully phonetic, grammatical writing.
  • Several participants suggest these cave signs are at best notation (e.g., tallies, calendars, clan marks), not language encoding.

Alternative Explanations for Recurring Signs

  • Simple-shape convergence: crosses, lines, spirals, hand stencils, etc., are what children or anyone with a stick and sand will independently produce.
  • Cultural continuity: deep, place-bound traditions (e.g., long-used rock art sites) show that symbols can be passed down for millennia without implying global contact.
  • Entoptic / phosphene hypothesis: some argue many motifs reflect internal visual phenomena (neural/retinal patterns in trance, darkness, or altered states), a position supported by a substantial specialist literature; others find this overconfident or non-falsifiable.
  • Fringe ideas (global plasma aurora, lost worldwide civilization, “Protong” ur-language) are raised by a few and strongly rejected by others as classic spurious-correlation or pseudo-science.

Definitions, Semantics, and Hype

  • Several comments criticize the article for blurring “language,” “writing,” “emoji,” and “graphic communication,” seeing this as a definitional sleight of hand to claim a record.
  • Others propose broader definitions (any intentional symbolic communication = “writing”), but this is not how linguists or archaeologists usually use the term.
  • Overall sentiment: recurring cave symbols are important evidence of very early, complex symbolic cognition—but calling them a “written language” is regarded as misleading.