“COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?
Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago (New Scientist, 20 February, p 30). Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.
The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.”
Read more at New Scientist
And (possibly) in English:
“What is believed to be the first ever example of English written in a British church has been discovered. Problem is, no-one can read it.
The 500-year-old inscription was found on a wall in Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, hidden behind a monument dedicated to an aristocrat.
The faded black lettering was discovered in January but experts have now asked for help from the public in a bid to make sense of the inscription.
Conservators came across the writing when they were preparing to clean a 350-year-old monument to Henry Hyde, a local aristocrat who was ‘martyred’ in the English Civil War for his support of King Charles I.
The text on the cathedral’s south aisle wall had been whitewashed over with lime, which is why it is hard to read.
Read more at the Daily Mail
All we need now are a ritually mutilated corpse and a strong minded yet vulnerable milf scientist and Dan Brown is good to go.
I believe it says ‘Anyone found writing on the walls will be excommunicated.’
Your subject is a little misleading – the English text is thought to be the earliest *found in a church*, not the oldest written English. There’s about 800 years’ difference…
I believe it says
“all your church are belong to us”
if it’s written on eggshells, isnt it more likely to be today’s special?
They’ll spend months trying to decipher that inscription on the chapel wall, and then find that it says something like, ‘Nathaniel woz ere’.
It does not really say why they think these are not simply droodles. The picture only shows simple lines next to eachother, or did they choose the wrong pic to go with the article.? That the lines have been done by adults, not childeren, that is clear to most who have seen childeren draw.
Oh well .. most interesting information might lack in this article, if that information is really there, that is.
At times I think they overreason, those scientists. Want to see something in anything. As with the voynich ms. Something we all can not prevend ourselves from doing I guess.
Will someone out there get to see our digital symbols ever and will he/she/it understand?
Finding stuff from way back is interesting and fantastic though .. at least I think so, I know by experience.
lol @jess