Every time I see something like this, I'm reminded of one of my favourite crackpot/artists of all time, Stanislaw Szukalski and his mad theories about "Protong", the proto-language of a civilisation that was destroyed by a cataclysm some 65,000 years ago, which - according to him - was the language of the first human civilisation across the globe, and which survived - barely - as a 'forgotten remembered language' in ancient pre-historic glyphs.<p>In a nutshell, "Protong" was the global human language that was spoken across the globe - until the planet suffered an enormous 'flood-like' cataclysm that split this civilisation into shards and pieces around the world. The survivors of this cataclysm clawed their way back to land, and in an effort to warn future humans of the danger, encoded many of the glyphs of Protong into their cave art. Per Szukalski this can be demonstrated by the fact of many common glyphs among a wide distribution of different cave paintings - the fact that the 'neck ring' is a key element in many paintings vastly separated by geographic distances, and the significance of such glyphs as a 'cup or water vessel', and so on.<p>Szukalski believed he was able to decipher these glyphs in a way that hadn't occurred to researchers before him, and he made an entire philosophy out of his personal discoveries.<p>While I still remain highly sceptical of his ideas - and I am especially dissuaded by the racist form of this philosophy that later evolved from Szukalskis explorations into ancient/pre-history art (Zermatism, the idea that the human species is in competition with another race, "Yeti-like", which brings about perpetual downfall among all "noble societies"), I nevertheless remain fascinated by the idea of using "Protong" as a means of appreciating the meaning of pre-history. From the Programmers Mind, its kind of like discovering the mnemonics for machine code, after having spoken nothing but Lua.<p>So, I do wonder if he wasn't onto something with the idea of Protong being an underpinning to all ancient/pre-historic art forms. If this sort of thing is of interest - and I mean it in the most casual sense, because I have absolutely no interest in promoting the racist Zermatism - then I encourage HN readers to have a look at Protong. The book on the subject "Behold - The Protong!!" is a wonderful coffee-table item, if you care for these things. I don't know of any other on-line resources which cover Protong - its a kooky subject indeed, so this is very surprising to me - but I do encourage the casually-interested to have a glance. It may - or may not, indeed - provide a bit of context to understanding pre-historic cave art. As a fan of this, I think its neat.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2118037.Behold_the_Protong" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2118037.Behold_the_Proto...</a><p>More on Szukalski here:<p><a href="https://www.kookscience.com/arch/Zermatic.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.kookscience.com/arch/Zermatic.html</a><p>Warning: definitely kook science, but a fascinating though experiment nevertheless.