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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)

#81
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.

Suppose you wanted to stand a large stone on end?

How would you do it?

Just get a stout log and a bunch of men and pry up one end of the stone and shovel dirt and debris under it.

Then pry it up again and repeat.

It would take a long time but eventually you could get it standing.

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

#82
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We call it 'The hug of death' here.

'slashdotted' works just as well (and is even preferred by many)

Except that Slashdot doesn't have a userbase capable of bringing a server to it's knees anymore.

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

#83

Reminds me of the also unbroken Indus script. With all this computational power, I'm surprised that we haven't been able to crack ancient proto-writing.

It's also similar to the Old Hungarian alphabet. Some of the symbols seem to be the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Hungarian_alphabet

They look very much like early British/Norse runes too.

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins presumably?

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

#86
post #69

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…

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 huma…

> Perhaps the ancients did have anti-gravity capable flying machines

Anti-gravity like that is essentially impossible according to physics.

Even if you decide that you think general relativity is wrong, if a society had antigravity, we would expect to see many more signs of their technological advancement.

Unless of course you want to believe that they used some sort of magic, using say incantations instead of technology.

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

#87
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.

Suppose you wanted to stand a large stone on end? How would you do it? Just get a stout log and a bunch of men and pry up one end of the stone and shovel dirt and debris under it. Then pry it up again and repeat. It would take a long time but eventually you could get it standing.

So, you've a 45 ton stone to lever up, how do you move the log that would be though enough to use as a lever ... How about the fulcrum stone, how do you move that ... levers will the way down?

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

#88
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"(W)e don't know exactly how it was done" is exactly what "unexplained mystery" means.

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

#90

Reminds me of the also unbroken Indus script. With all this computational power, I'm surprised that we haven't been able to crack ancient proto-writing.

> Reminds me of the also unbroken Indus script. With all this computational power, I'm surprised that we haven't been able to crack ancient proto-writing. Attempts to crack the Indus script with the aid of computers have been made since at least the 1970s (a large Soviet team went to work on it then), but the problem is that the Indus script may not actually encode the sounds of a language. If it is essentially a set…

> And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.

I feel this conclusion rather weak.

As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed [1]. Another one is the hieroglyphs.

Re-constructing how mayan words sounded is still on-going [2].

Also, this type of work is not really possible to "crack with computers" as some have suggested (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment

2: https://decipherment.wordpress.com/

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