In Dec 2024, I read the New Scientist Essential Guide N4 where they highlighted von Petzinger's work. I made a note to read her book as I found this thing about signs so fascinating.
The book is good. Some bits were a bit boring, to be honest, but overall, I liked it. The author tells her story about how she goes to all ice age caves in Europe, to inventory not cave art, but cave signs. She identified 32 signs that are repeated consistently across place and time. She explains a bit of evolutionary history, a bit of language, linguistics, and writing, as well as the difference between spoken language - ephemeral - and written language - permanent. She makes a case of how human beings might have been more than capable of abstract thinking and therefore writing, way before current beliefs. Finally she proposes a few ideas of what some of the signs could mean. Von Petzinger does not provide a Rosetta stone for cave signs but presents a very interesting view of prehistoric life. Hopefully, after more research is done, we'll have a better idea of what these signs mean.
A couple of nice quotes: "There is no permanence to spoken language. It is very much anchored in the moment, in the exchange, after which it becomes only a memory, one that we may or may not remember accurately, and even the memory itself will soon fade into oblivion."
"The first instance of making an intentional graphic mark was one of the most profoundly important moments in our species’ history – right up there with the invention of tools, the control of fire, and the development of spoken language. Whatever this mark may have been, even if it was just a single line, doesn’t matter. What matter is that, for the first time, someone purposefully made a mark on a physical surface with the intent to communicate meaning. That message had the power to survive beyond that specific place and moment, and language had officially taken on a life of its own – another life beyond that of its maker."
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