Dear David,
Thanks for this. I knew about batons carved by the early ancestors of information designers dated to 20,000 years ago. This pushes the boundaries back further. Batons and these artefacts describe, record, or map. What they describe in unclear, so they are different to archeological calendars that predict where stars or planets will be. Even so, batons and inscribed bone fragments are important steps toward science.
The external representation of knowledge through documentation and information created a new way to be human. The first information tools began to “reshape the way we think” (Burke and Ornstein 1997: 29-31). This was “the first deliberate use of a device which would serve to extend the memory, because with it, knowledge could be held in recorded form outside the brain or the sequence of a ritual.” The relationship between these tools and the human mind is significant, in that “the cognitive facilities needed to make the batons required a brain capable of a complex series of visual and temporal concepts, demanding both recall and recognition. These are exactly the same mental abilities which are involved in modern reading and writing.” As tool-making and tool use became the conscious subject of willed imagination, our tools and tool-making behavior helped us to survive and prosper as humans.
It is interesting to think a bit more about the oldest professors. The late Bernard Knox once wrote a book titled The Oldest Dead White European Males about classical Greece. Knox, a British-born American citizen, lived an astonishing life. He nearly died fighting against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He later parachuted into France to aid the Resistance in World War II. Coming on a copy of Virgil’s First Georgic in Italy, he vowed to study the classics if he managed to survive the war. He did survive, living to write marvellous books, Oedipus at Thebes among them, as well as The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Death promoted Knox from old professor to dead white European male, much as you and I will one day become.
The ancient artefact in your article reminds me of a famous and common epitaph seen on the New England tombstones of my childhood:
Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you must be,
Prepare for death and follow me.
These days, I live in the Gamla Stan (old town) section of Kalmar, Sweden. When you turn right out my front door in, the old cemetery is 50 meters down the old stone street. We use don't have modern, squared-off cobblestones. They make and remake our street by pounding round stones into the earth. The cemetery was started in the 800s or so. Around the 1300s, they built a church that was destroyed in the 1670s during one of our many wars with Denmark.
In the old days, the Danish border was a few kilometres down the road from my house. Kalmar Castle was built to protect civilised Swedes from marauding Danes. Sweden acquired Skåne in the Treaty of Roskilde of 1658. Lund University was established in 1666 to bring Swedish virtues to former Danish lands. I once heard the former rector of Lund University give a welcome speech explaining the history of the university. She then proclaimed: “Danes are now welcome to visit … if they behave.”
The Danes, of course, say the same thing about Swedes. Some years ago, Carlsberg ran a television commercial in which a Swedish tourist walked into a Copenhagen pub. He asked the bartender for a Carlsberg. The bartender filled a glass. As he handed it to the Swede, he gave him stern glare, saying: “You may drink *our* beer … if you behave yourself.” It is said that the Swedish ambassador filed a protest.
Here in Kalmar, we have a young University, Linnaeus. It was established in 2010. I don’t know much about it. I commute to work in Shanghai.
But I do like to wander around Old Town. If you go out our back door, you see the entry to Kalmar Castle, 75 meters away. Between here and there lies the City Cemetery, established in the 1800s or so. And off to the right is the Jewish Cemetery, one of the few in Sweden. My dog Freddy and I walk among the dead every day. Our three cemeteries are an exclusive destination. To paraphrase Woody Allen, people are dying to get in. And our neighbourhood is nice and quiet.
Looking at your bone artefacts, I wonder what the future holds for our bones. In a fantasy novel by Elizabeth Moon, the royal family keeps an ossuary with the painted and inscribed bones of the dead. The bones tell the story of their former owner's life and the times in which he or she lived. Perhaps some future library will hold our inscribed bones.
As Sophocles writes:
“But these are great mysteries . . .
words must never rouse them from their depths.
You will learn them all for yourself, once
you come to our destination, you alone.”
We all go there alone.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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Reference
Burke, James and Ornstein, Robert (1997) The axemaker’s gift. Technology’s capture and control of our minds and culture, New York: Tarcher Putnam.
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David Sless wrote:
—snip—
I have always thought this early (40,000 years old) example of information design (Attached) was an early example of counting for keeping track of things like phases of the moon. But perhaps it was a record of clients/lovers? The shape would lend credence to that, like notches on a gun? BTW, the rest of the article may be interesting reading for some, even if it is circa 1990 (the article, that is).
—snip—
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