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Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

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Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a video demonstration of how a single person can erect stones as in Stonehenge. Basically, you lever it up bit by bit by placing a log or b other fulcrum under the stone, off-center, and place weights on the shorter end until the other end of the stone lifts. Add a higher fulcrum on the other side, repeat until the stone is high enough to be tipped into a hole dug into the ground to hold it.

Maybe this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYQBDhkBfr0

That's probably it. The technique is a little different from my recollection, but that's memory for you.

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#62
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a video demonstration of how a single person can erect stones as in Stonehenge. Basically, you lever it up bit by bit by placing a log or b other fulcrum under the stone, off-center, and place weights on the shorter end until the other end of the stone lifts. Add a higher fulcrum on the other side, repeat until the stone is high enough to be tipped into a hole dug into the ground to hold it.

Don't forget they had to drag them from Southern Wales. Getting them in place was just the final phenomenal feat.

It's impressive, yes. And probably we don't know exactly how it was done. But that's not the same as saying it's an unexplained mystery - we just don't know which particular methods they used, even if we know one or more ways in which it could have been done.

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#64
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just 'ancient astronaut' nonsense. If you gave modern people some incentive to move big stones around without heavy machinery they would figure out how to do it in a couple of months. It's just not hard to do, and people have been moving much larger pieces of stone during recorded history, so we know the techniques used perfectly well. Lots of the obelisks in Rome are far larger than any prehistoric stones mo…

Who mentioned ancient astronauts? Archeologists don't seem to be as blasé as you about this: > Nothing puzzles archaeologists so much as impracticality, and although the karst topography of Baalbek demands strong foundation stones, and although one big stone is easier to move than many smaller stones, the pillars holding up the temple’s podium, van Ess says, are bigger than they need to be. In fact, Baalbek is one of…

Many gothic cathedrals still standing also are stronger than they have to be. Reason? Building was still guesswork at the time and the ones built too weak have long collapsed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauvais_Cathedral is an edge case.

So, it may be lack of structural engineering knowledge. They also may have intended to build something bigger, but realised they ran out of time or money, or the “something bigger” collapsed, and this is a rebuild, reusing parts.

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#65
post #48

Top 32 cave symbols that will blow your mind! What these researchers found in caves will amaze you! 32 sure signs you're in a European ice age cave! Discover these cave-dwelling secrets that your real estate developer doesn't want you to know!

What your archaeologist doesn't know about cave symbols can KILL YOU

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#66
Every time I see something like this, I'm reminded of one of my favourite crackpot/artists of all time, Stanislaw Szukalski and his mad theories about "Protong", the proto-language of a civilisation that was destroyed by a cataclysm some 65,000 years ago, which - according to him - was the language of the first human civilisation across the globe, and which survived - barely - as a 'forgotten remembered language' in ancient pre-historic glyphs.

In a nutshell, "Protong" was the global human language that was spoken across the globe - until the planet suffered an enormous 'flood-like' cataclysm that split this civilisation into shards and pieces around the world. The survivors of this cataclysm clawed their way back to land, and in an effort to warn future humans of the danger, encoded many of the glyphs of Protong into their cave art. Per Szukalski this can be demonstrated by the fact of many common glyphs among a wide distribution of different cave paintings - the fact that the 'neck ring' is a key element in many paintings vastly separated by geographic distances, and the significance of such glyphs as a 'cup or water vessel', and so on.

Szukalski believed he was able to decipher these glyphs in a way that hadn't occurred to researchers before him, and he made an entire philosophy out of his personal discoveries.

While I still remain highly sceptical of his ideas - and I am especially dissuaded by the racist form of this philosophy that later evolved from Szukalskis explorations into ancient/pre-history art (Zermatism, the idea that the human species is in competition with another race, "Yeti-like", which brings about perpetual downfall among all "noble societies"), I nevertheless remain fascinated by the idea of using "Protong" as a means of appreciating the meaning of pre-history. From the Programmers Mind, its kind of like discovering the mnemonics for machine code, after having spoken nothing but Lua.

So, I do wonder if he wasn't onto something with the idea of Protong being an underpinning to all ancient/pre-historic art forms. If this sort of thing is of interest - and I mean it in the most casual sense, because I have absolutely no interest in promoting the racist Zermatism - then I encourage HN readers to have a look at Protong. The book on the subject "Behold - The Protong!!" is a wonderful coffee-table item, if you care for these things. I don't know of any other on-line resources which cover Protong - its a kooky subject indeed, so this is very surprising to me - but I do encourage the casually-interested to have a glance. It may - or may not, indeed - provide a bit of context to understanding pre-historic cave art. As a fan of this, I think its neat.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2118037.Behold_the_Proto...

More on Szukalski here:

https://www.kookscience.com/arch/Zermatic.html

Warning: definitely kook science, but a fascinating though experiment nevertheless.

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#67
> Among the elaborate horses, bulls, bears and hunters, there are some other rather less captivating designs – small geometric motifs, etched onto the walls. Until now, they’ve not received much attention.

I would have expected the opposite.

Someone drawing animals and hunters could easily be explained simply by them drawing what they see everyday.

Those other things, though, are harder to explain as merely drawings of things they see.

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#68
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/806287/dolphins-speech...

They've been claiming this one for years though. However, IF they crack it, it's going to be a game changer; Unlike apes, Dolphins have a much more complex vocal language. As humans we'll be forced to re-evaluate our position on the sentient species ladder. Of course, this'll all be for nought if the Vogons get here first and all the Dolphins disappear.

> As humans we'll be forced to re-evaluate our position on the sentient species ladder.

I bet that we will just keep trying hard to kill all of them to regain our top position.

Re: Symbols Found in Ice Age Caves Across Europe (2015)

#69
post #22

The mainstream view of our history has some massive unexplained mysteries. For example the ability of ancient people to work with massive slabs of stone in a way we'd struggle to do now even with modern machinery. Not just the Pyramids and Stonehenge, but the stone foundations at Cuzco and also Baalbeck temple which apparently has foundational stones estimated to weigh 1000 tons.

This is just 'ancient astronaut' nonsense. If you gave modern people some incentive to move big stones around without heavy machinery they would figure out how to do it in a couple of months. It's just not hard to do, and people have been moving much larger pieces of stone during recorded history, so we know the techniques used perfectly well. Lots of the obelisks in Rome are far larger than any prehistoric stones mo…

I think, the further back in history we go, the kookier things get - and that this is a positive, not a negative aspect of the experience. We in the modern age have conditioned ourselves to be subjugated to science - well, for the humans alive 20,000 years ago, cave-paintings were science. The fact that we don't understand them now, and have very strong opinions about the nature of civilisation in that period of human history, is more of the effect that time and history have on human consciousness - namely, occlusion and obfuscation. Kooky explanations for the weird and unusual artefacts we discover in the modern age are to be expected - we are as oblivious to the meaning of ancient art/science as they would be, had we a time machine, of our modern rocketry and iPhones and so on.

I think the Imperial View which tends to lead one to discount observations made beyond the lunatic fringe is less valuable than the conjecture and supposition that occurs when someone, perhaps weird and unintelligent, says to themselves "What if ...?" and then subsequently go off to investigate.

Never forget, even Newton was considered a crackpot for a period. We kill and eat our messiahs, after all, it is an ancient and provocative segment of human psyche, that we have been unable to shake the bonds of cannibalistic behaviour in our societies - sure, we're not cooking and roasting on an open fire, unless that fire is a metaphor for the modern thinker, convinced of their own righteousness.

I'm personally unconvinced that there weren't ancient civilisations with advanced technologies, yet undiscovered, which moved mountains for their own purposes.

We need only look at the deleterious effect of technology in our own generation to understand just how banal things can get, vis a vis forgotten science, and specifically technology. Perhaps the ancients did have anti-gravity capable flying machines that allowed them to build these structures - and perhaps the tech was lost in a few generations because of the deleterious effects of "planned obsolescence" at such scale. Unless someone is willing to stick their neck out and ask "What if .. there are UFO's buried under these mountains/&etc.?", we'll never really know.

Of course I understand the requirement that sense trump fiction - however I don't agree that the line is so drawn in the sands and stones of the ancients. There are many, many signs that we do not understand, and yet many clues that there is more to ancient history, and particularly civilizations beyond our comprehension, than there is 'total certainty of fact'.

Heck, even the Pentagon admits it doesn't know it all about UFO's, c'mon ..

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