... on Genevieve von Petzinger's 32 late palaeolithic signs

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Genevieve von Petzinger's 32 late palaeolithic signs · ... on Genevieve von Petzinger's view on human religion and symbolic behaviour · Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Prehistory of France

First her excellent video:

Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe | Genevieve von Petzinger
TED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJnEQCMA5Sg

She is married, guys!

Then, my comments to some time signatures in it:

2:36 "the evolution of creativity and imagination"

I suppose if you take cave art of the Cro Magnon styles (Magdalenian and Aurignacian, Grattian, some more perhaps) as having perdured 30 000 years, from 40 000 BP to 10 000 BP, it would seem human creativity was less evolved in these artists than it is now.

[I meant Gravettian, not Grattian!]

Now, if this is about the time between Flood and Babel, like 100 or 400 years, it could even be a single artist or dad and son.

Now the thing is, if C14 was very low at Flood (say 2.15 percent modern carbon) and rose very quickly so Babel gets the carbon dates of Göbekli Tepe, that is a lot of doublings in real short time, and resolves in retrospect as a lot of halvings and therefore a lot of halflives if you presume original level to have been close to 100 pmc all or most of the time.

And in that case, you don't get a 30 000 year long stasis of styles which would really mean we were less creative back then than between 1200 and 1600 AD (and even than between 1600 and 2017 AD, while this was more static).

4:15 You are forgetting versification and memnonics, unless you mean by message not self same "message content", but self same external "message package".

You can learn Pater Noster in Sweden while converting to Catholicism and you can transmit an identical text of it in France more than 20 years later, if you find someone to teach it to.

If you look at the first chapters of Genesis (pre-Flood or even up to Babel, i e to chapters 6 or 11) each is so short, it would not be a very remarkable feat for one taking special training in it to receive it correctly from Adam or whoever of his successors was dictating and transmit it a few centuries (for the pre-Flood chapters) identically, as long as the language remained identical.

5:52 You might be the right person to ask ...

The geometric shapes that look like dots packed together which we just saw, could these possibly be representing clan size households of Noah's family or at first even the growth of it?

In other words, are the dots either increasing in numbers or staying abround a fixed number which would be practical for a camp while mankind was roaming towards the plains of Shinar, from Ararat, with lots of to and fro?

7:08 32 is also roughly speaking a nice number of phonemes for a language ...

8:52 ... however, it does not quite look like words spelled out, more like mindmaps with abbreviations in each place.

Have you checked trying to match (all combinations possible) signs with Hebrew alphabet letters and see if anything looks like Table of Nations Genealogies in Genesis 10, or rehearsals of the 10 generation genealogy in Genesis 5 or the 8 generation genealogy in Genesis 4?

Like Adam, Seth, Enosh abbreviated aleph, shin, aleph ...?

Like Cain, Henoch, Irad abbreviated kaph, heth (or he?), iod (or aleph)?

10:10 Things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives ...

If you are writing a text to be readable as a new message, you need all that.

If you are writing a memory aid, initials of key words is enough.

Adam genuit Seth, Seth genuit Enos, Enos genuit Cainan (same style as genealogy in Matthew, while that in Genesis 5 is more fleshed out) ... all you need to write for Latin would be ASECMIHMLN.

As Latin wasn't, but Hebrew (or protosemitic or gheez or aramaic) was pre-Babel language, I obviously mean for that kind of language instead.

Obviously, I mean that the first version of a Genesis 5 genealogy someone learned as a child would have been Adam genuit Seth, Seth genuit Enos ... and then the extra information would be added as explanations to the fully learned between Adam and Moses.

10:44, where you saw star constellations, I saw population.

Recall God's promise to Abraham? (But Genesis 12 and certainly 14 is probably Chalcolithic already).

Update 20.VII.2019: when reading Irving Finkel's L'Arche avant Noé, translated from The Ark Before Noah I find, on page 89, that the Ugaritic proto-alphabet had 31 signs, including one for separating words. Very similar to the 32 number here, and Ugaritic is a Semitic language of the North West Semitic subdivision required by either Hebrew or Aramaic for original post-Flood language./HGL