{"id":14514,"date":"2018-02-23T06:23:44","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T06:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=14514"},"modified":"2020-05-27T06:09:23","modified_gmt":"2020-05-27T06:09:23","slug":"the-writing-on-the-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/the-writing-on-the-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"The writing on the wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did humans speak through cave art? New paper links ancient drawings and language\u2019s origins.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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While the world\u2019s best-known cave art exists in France and Spain, examples of it abound throughout the world.
Image: stock image of a cave painting in South Africa<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa.<\/span><\/p>\n

A key to this idea is that cave art is often located in acoustic \u201chot spots,\u201d where sound echoes strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those drawings are located in deeper, harder-to-access parts of caves, indicating that acoustics was a principal reason for the placement of drawings within caves. The drawings, in turn, may represent the sounds that early humans generated in those spots.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the new paper, this convergence of sound and drawing is what the authors call a \u201ccross-modality information transfer,\u201d a convergence of auditory information and visual art that, the authors write, \u201callowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking.\u201d The combination of sounds and images is one of the things that characterizes human language today, along with its symbolic aspect and its ability to generate infinite new sentences.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCave art was part of the package deal in terms of how\u00a0homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0came to have this very high-level cognitive processing,\u201d says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. \u201cYou have this very concrete cognitive process that converts an acoustic signal into some mental representation and externalizes it as a visual.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cave artists were thus not just early-day Monets, drawing impressions of the outdoors at their leisure. Rather, they may have been engaged in a process of communication.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s very clear that these artists were talking to one another,\u201d Miyagawa says. \u201cIt\u2019s a communal effort.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The paper, \u201cCross-modality information transfer: A hypothesis about the relationship among prehistoric cave paintings, symbolic thinking, and the emergence of language,\u201d is being published in the journal\u00a0Frontiers in Psychology<\/em>. The authors are Miyagawa; Cora Lesure, a PhD student in MIT\u2019s Department of Linguistics; and Vitor A. Nobrega, a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Re-enactments and rituals?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The advent of language in human history is unclear. Our species is estimated to be about 200,000 years old. Human language is often considered to be at least 100,000 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to try to understand how human language itself appeared in evolution,\u201d Miyagawa says, noting that \u201cwe don\u2019t know 99.9999 percent of what was going on back then.\u201d However, he adds, \u201cThere\u2019s this idea that language doesn\u2019t fossilize, and it\u2019s true, but maybe in these artifacts [cave drawings], we can see some of the beginnings of\u00a0homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0as symbolic beings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While the world\u2019s best-known cave art exists in France and Spain, examples of it exist throughout the world. One form of cave art suggestive of symbolic thinking \u2014 geometric engravings on pieces of ochre, from the Blombos Cave in southern Africa \u2014 has been estimated to be at least 70,000 years old. Such symbolic art indicates a cognitive capacity that humans took with them to the rest of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCave art is everywhere,\u201d Miyagawa says. \u201cEvery major continent inhabited by\u00a0homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0has cave art. \u2026 You find it in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, everywhere, just like human language.\u201d In recent years, for instance, scholars have catalogued Indonesian cave art they believe to be roughly 40,000 years old, older than the best-known examples of European cave art.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what exactly was going on in caves where people made noise and rendered things on walls? Some scholars have suggested that acoustic \u201chot spots\u201d in caves were used to make noises that replicate hoofbeats, for instance; some 90 percent of cave drawings involve hoofed animals. These drawings could represent stories or the accumulation of knowledge, or they could have been part of rituals.<\/span><\/p>\n

In any of these scenarios, Miyagawa suggests, cave art displays properties of language in that \u201cyou have action, objects, and modification.\u201d This parallels some of the universal features of human language \u2014 verbs, nouns, and adjectives \u2014 and Miyagawa suggests that \u201cacoustically based cave art must have had a hand in forming our cognitive symbolic mind.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Future research: More decoding needed<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

To be sure, the ideas proposed by Miyagawa, Lesure, and Nobrega merely outline a working hypothesis, which is intended to spur additional thinking about language\u2019s origins and point toward new research questions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding the cave art itself, that could mean further scrutiny of the syntax of the visual representations, as it were. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to look at the content\u201d more thoroughly, says Miyagawa. In his view, as a linguist who has looked at images of the famous Lascaux cave art from France, \u201cyou see a lot of language in it.\u201d But it remains an open question how much a re-interpretation of cave art images would yield in linguistics terms.<\/span><\/p>\n

The long-term timeline of cave art is also subject to re-evaluation on the basis of any future discoveries. If cave art is implicated in the development of human language, finding and properly dating the oldest known such drawings would help us place the orgins of language in human history \u2014 which may have happened fairly early on in our development.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we need is for someone to go and find in Africa cave art that is 120,000 years old,\u201d Miyagawa quips.<\/span><\/p>\n

At a minimum, a further consideration of cave art as part of our cognitive development may reduce our tendency to regard art in terms of our own experience, in which it probably plays a more strictly decorative role for more people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf this is on the right track, it\u2019s quite possible that \u2026 cross-modality transfer helped develop a symbolic mind,\u201d Miyagawa says. In that case, he adds, \u201cart is not just something that is marginal to our culture, but central to the formation of our cognitive abilities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did humans speak through cave art? New paper links ancient drawings and language\u2019s origins. CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor. \u00a0 More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,17,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other","category-research","category-social-science"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0-300x201.jpg",300,201,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",383,256,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/MIT-Cave-Art-Language_0.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Other<\/a> Research<\/a> Social Science<\/a>","tag_info":"Social Science","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}