link to open access paper
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0338509
The results demonstrate that Homo sapiens during the late MSA mastered precise, pre-planned patterns anchored in specific geometric affordances: orthogonality and parallelism. These affordances were related and organized through a distinct set of cognitive operations: rotation, translation, iteration, and embedding.
Our dataset is particularly well represented by rotation, translation, and iteration, as these operations enable the construction of simple yet recurrent combinations, including aligned sets of lines and repeated angular configurations. Notably, the analysis revealed that some of these combinations generate a defined spatial framework within which embedding occurs. This framework represents a zero level—a reference plane—within which features and operations are nested to form highly structured, regularly spaced patterns such as hatched bands, grids, and diamonds.
What emerges is a ‘geometric grammar’, that is a coherent and procedural system of operations through which patterns are constructed according to a stable internal logic.
Fig 2. A synthesis of a spatial and chronological assessment of the EOES motifs. Data elaborated from Texier et al. [2]; Heshilwood et al. [3]; Jacobs et al. [29]. We have associated the two fragments from Apollo 11 to the ‘sub-parallel intersecting lines motif’ as, in our statistical analyses, they display the same values in terms of regularity of line alignments, consistent with the fragments in the same category from Diepkloof.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0338509.g002
And that calls into question the generally accepted notion that the way we’ve organized our societies has been getting progressively better over the timeline of our species and that we might be able to take some of the aspects of our modern world that meet that criteria(solar electricity, medical advancements, etc) can be applied to older paradigms. Fusing old and new to create a better world for human kind. Revolutionary book
Reminds me of Harari’s Sapiens, supporting the idea that most revolutions, starting from the agricultural one, actually made our lives globally worse.
I’ve got some criticisms of Harari but in general I agree. I think he leans a bit hard into the narrative of progression but i haven’t re-read Sapiens in the context of having read The Dawn of Everything
I also felt he was quite heavy handed on fitting his narrative, and 21 questions cemented that for me - not a book I would heavily recommend, it just fitted the topic
Sapiens is so heavily overfitted that I almost couldn’t finish it the first time I read it through. You could say the same about Dawn of Everything , except that Dawn 's purpose was to show that there were not just counterexamples for many generally accepted things, but in some cases new evidence that totally overturns some of that “common knowledge.”
For sure, I’m not gonna say the dude or the book has zero value, cause if memory serves there are some good points made. But overall I think he misses the mark hard because he wanted to hit a different one