121–130 of 150 posts
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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.
The signs painted in caves have been preserved to this day but at the time I guess that they were also used outside, on rocks and on trees, and that they were lost to time... With perhaps the exception of dance, the classic arts really are prehistoric mnemonic/communication devices which were made obsolete when writing was invented. They were so useful though that craving them has been carved in our genes, and we sti…
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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?
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Look again, I know the picture isnt the best, but its spot on.
Ahhhhh no, but you might want to check your confirmation bias.
To under exaggerate this time, one rectangle is drawn inside a cave and another rectangle is drawn inside another cave 1000 years later. 25,000 years later modern man finds these rectangles drawn on the walls and is astonished? Is it not just kinda a given that before speech communication there was drawn image communication (like point at images and grunt)? I mention the 1000 year gap only to point out that they prob…
No, not really a given at all.
And those are not images -- they form a symbolic language. If we're merely talking about "point to images and grunt" it would concern drawings of animals and stuff, not abstract symbols. Those are already a kind of language.
And even if it was, having the same stock library of symbols used more or less across continents and ages is important enough in itself.
I bet the omnipresent "Sun"-symbol is removed from results, to conform with German Laws and general sentiments. You can find it on Nordic Runes and Tibetan tapestry and American Indian tepee decorations. And it always means "Sun" or "Good Luck" or something positive. Except after 1945 it does not.
> And it always means "Sun" or "Good Luck" or something positive. Except after 1945 it does not. The swastika was already quite firmly linked with fascism in Europe by the late 1920s.
It wasn't. If anything, it was linked to preservation of tradition and conservatism. I know from my grandparents, who are Polish Highlanders, that it also doubles for holy cross, and thus was used in sacral contexts or on tombstones:
https://slowianowierstwo.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/1095605... https://slowianowierstwo.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/76313_3... https://slowianowierstwo.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/1274539...
European fascism builds on pride and glorification of national symbols, and reuse of those. For example here's Polish Fascists symbol that dates to '30s:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green_flag_with_symb...
This is arm holding sword, and symbol was created as replacement for original symbol that was legendary sword that first polish king used to strike the gates of Kiev as he was establishing borders of first Polish Kingdom.
Likewise symbol of Italian fascists was the Fasces (notice ), roman symbol for power and rule of their government.
Spanish fascists used crests of their past royal family, the Falanga:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bandera_FE_JONS.svg
Here's Croatian fascists symbol:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usta%C5%A1e_symbol.svg
Swastika was something that Germans adapted for their fascist movement, and it spread from there after the war, but saying that before war the swastika was already firmly linked with fascism is not true.
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Ahhhhh no, but you might want to check your confirmation bias.
Please don't post snarky dismissals to HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is. It only makes the thread even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> 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 may…
That is no counterexample. The Mayan written language was related to a number of surviving languages, making decipherment easier.
> Another one is the hieroglyphs.
The Egyptian hieroglyphs could not be deciphered until the discovery of the Rosetta stone, where the hieroglyphic text was accompanied by translations into Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Before that, there had been attempts for many centuries to decipher the hieroglyphs but they proved fruitless.
I bet the omnipresent "Sun"-symbol is removed from results, to conform with German Laws and general sentiments. You can find it on Nordic Runes and Tibetan tapestry and American Indian tepee decorations. And it always means "Sun" or "Good Luck" or something positive. Except after 1945 it does not.
I don't believe that Swastika symbol is as ancient as these. Wikipedia tells me that it appears for the first time in 3000 BCE in India. Also, regarding "German Laws and general sentiment", I invite you to read this detailed blog post[1] on the history of Svasti symbols in Unicode[2] and the controversies around getting them in Unicode. Edit: Typo. Links corrected. [1]: https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/02/when-is…
