The Evolution of Visual Information Encoding

Introduction

Language leaves no trace in the fossil record. However, an important component of the human language capacity, symbolic combinatoriality, might have “fossilized” after all. In the Paleolithic, hominins embarked on their journey from Africa into the rest of the world. On their way, they left artefacts which provide a window into their mind.

Geometric Signs in Prehistoric Times

Some of these artefacts bear early examples of visual information encoding: geometric signs. In the Middle Paleolithic, when Homo neanderthalensis roamed the landscape, evidence for geometric signs is scarce. It is not before the Middle Stone Age in Africa, typically associated with Homo sapiens, that the first systematic industries emerge.

Arrival of Homo sapiens in Central Europe

By the time Homo sapiens arrives in Central Europe – in the Upper Paleolithic – the practice of using stones, beads, bone fragments, and figurines as information carriers has become part of everyday life. In fact, the abundance of geometric signs in these assemblages is only gradually coming to light via large-scale collection efforts.

Project Proposal

This project proposes to marry the growing body of archaeological data with state-of-the-art tools from empirical linguistics to assess the Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE) in the human lineage.

Methodology

To this end, the following statistical measures need to be developed and applied:

1. Statistical measures based on information theory
2. Quantitative linguistic laws
3. Classification algorithms

These will be applied to sequences of Paleolithic signs, ancient writing, and modern writing.

Hypotheses

Two core hypotheses are to be tested:

1. Paleolithic signs are statistically distinct from ancient and modern writing.
2. There was a combinatorial transition in the Upper Paleolithic of around 35,000 to 15,000 years ago.

If the latter is verified, we would witness a major step towards modern visual information encoding – 10,000 years before the advent of ancient writing.