Hints for Preparing Documents Most documents go through several versions (always more than you expected) before they are finally finished. Accordingly, you should do whatever possible to make the job of changing them easy. First, when you do the purely mechanical operations of typing, type so subsequent editing will be easy. Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later. — Brian W. Kernighan, 1974

Those who hold the second position, usually called panpsychism or panexperientialism, agree that all this may be true but argue that emergence is not enough.

As British philosopher Galen Strawson recently put it, to imagine that one can travel from insensate matter to a being capable of discussing the existence of insensate matter in a mere two jumps is simply to make emergence do too much work.

emergentism. The argument here is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before.

Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it. (The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.)

Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage.

But in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.

To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”

Kropotkin’s actual argument is far more interesting. Much of it, for instance, is concerned with how animal cooperation often has nothing to do with survival or reproduction, but is a form of pleasure in itself. “To take flight in flocks merely for pleasure is quite common among all sorts of birds,” he writes. Kropotkin multiplies examples of social play: pairs of vultures wheeling about for their own entertainment, hares so keen to box with other species that they occasionally (and unwisely) approach foxes, flocks of birds performing military-style maneuvers, bands of squirrels coming together for wrestling and similar games

If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth.

the neo-Darwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed.

We all know the eventual answer, which the discovery of genes made possible. Animals were simply trying to maximize the propagation of their own genetic codes. Curiously, this view—which eventually came to be referred to as neo-Darwinian—was developed largely by figures who considered themselves radicals of one sort or another.

Mutual Aid grew from a series of essays written in response to Thomas Henry Huxley, a well-known Social Darwinist, and summarized the Russian understanding of the day, which was that while competition was undoubtedly one factor driving both natural and social evolution, the role of cooperation was ultimately decisive.

An alternative school of Darwinism emerged in Russia emphasizing cooperation, not competition, as the driver of evolutionary change. In 1902 this approach found a voice in a popular book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by naturalist and revolutionary anarchist pamphleteer Peter Kropotkin.

Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories. Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe.

Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?

How do you maintain the interdisciplinarity of your zettlekasten? .t3_10f9tnk._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

12 “In summer 2010, seven cardboard boxes with lexicographical slips compiled by Dr. GertrudBauer were presented by Professor Peter Nagel (Bonn) to the DDGLC office, which had beenhanded over to him in the early 1990s by the late Professor Alexander Böhlig. The Gertrud-und-Alexander-Böhlig Stiftung funded the scanning and slotting of the slips into a database accord-ing to the hierarchical structure of the original compilation,” http://research.uni-leip-zig.de/ddglc/bauer/BauerIndex.pdf

The slips constitute a thorough lexicographical compila-tion of about 15,000 attestations of almost 150 types of Greek prepositions, con-junctions and particles in Coptic, from virtually all Coptic dialects and types oftexts, arranged on the basis of a detailed analysis of their semantic and syntacticproperties.

Since 2015 a digitalized card index of Greek functionwords in Coptic is available online (as part of the DDGCL)

In 1975 Gertrud Bauer10 published her “Konkordanz der nichtflektiertengriechischen Wörter im bohairischen Neuen Testament”,11 but this work was onlya part of a large collection of lexicographical slips which was produced in the1970s and 1980s for Prof. Alexander Böhlig’s loanword project at the Universityof Tübingen, Germany.

Language contact and contact induced changein the light of the (digital) lexicography ofGreek loanwords in the non-Indo-Europeanlanguages of the Greco-Roman worlds (Coptic,Hebrew/Aramaic, Syriac)

If you have experienced trouble in rememberingdates try the following system which has proved beneficial to at least onestudent.

It is not a bad plan for two or more students to meet at stated intervals and compare their notes . The lecture can be discussed so that thepoints omitted or not fully understood can be placed correctly in the notebook against the final test . The chance for error is greatly decreased inthis way and, besides , the discussion greatly aids the memory so that thework of studying from the notes is lessened . In at least one instance wherethe speaker delivered his lecture very rapidly several students arrangedto take his points in relays ; that is, since there was scarcely time for oneman to get all, one man could take the first point, another the second, andso on. These men occupied seats close together so that an exchange ofsignals was possible. Afterwards they discussed each lecture and puttheir notes together.

One even better plan is to get regular library index cards and, afterthe lecture is fairly well learned, transfer the points underlined to them, onecard to a lecture. These cards can be carried about and studied at oddmoments. One is enabled by their use to get the perspective view of thelecture which brings out the sense of values which one loses when onestudies the notes in their mass of detail only. With the skeleton in mindone has little difficulty in recalling the details .

An excellent way tomake the important points stand out is to read the entire set of notes verycarefully, underlining the more vital points in red ink. Such a method willmake them stand out from the rest and give the eye a scale of values moreeasily remembered.

It may be an advantage to learn shorthand, as many do , and takethe notes verbatim, but there really is no necessity for taking entire lectures ; in fact lectures may be a disadvantage because they make morework to be gone over.

me word or expression every time the notes may be bothfull and legible. Thus "b," with date , is "born" and "d" is "died" ; "dif"is "different from" ; "lit" is "literature" ; "Shak" is " Shakspere" ; "gov"is "governor ;" "govt" is "government" ; "cal" is "calculate" ; "cur" is"current"; "org" is "organic" or "organism"; "prep" is "precipitate" ;"dec" is "decant" ; " " is "filter"; "comp" is "compound" ; " H" is"Hydrogen" ; "dyn" is " dynamo ", or "dynamic" ; "dn" is "dyne", etc. ,without end. You need not be particular about grammar or completeness .There is no limitation save clearness and accuracy. One must be able toread the notes later.

it maybe well to take the notes directly in the text book, either on the margins,between the leaves, or on insert-leaves which book-shops sell for that pu

Thus his notes will be legible, interesting and complete,and more than this, the process of rewriting wll fix the various points muchbetter in his mind at a time when it is most susceptible to them, than anystudy from cold notes can do .

The student should become as little conscious of his notebookas possible , that his mind may act reflexively ; that is, from habit, automatically.

It is necessary that the student be alert to reason as the speakerreasons. It is very dangerous to jot down the results of reasoning if youhave not followed it in your own mind.

The first injunction is then : Do not try to take the lecture verbatim.

In about eight cases out of ten the early notes of theFreshman are not worth the paper they are written on.

A few decades ago college libraries were maintained for the almost exclusive useof the professor and the graduate student. Not only were books too rareand costly for promiscuous handling by the "vulgar" undergraduate, butfris crude mind was not considered sufficiently developed to be able toappreciate the great works of science and literature at first hand . It wasstill an age of theoretical knowledge so far as the undergraduate was concerned. The student had to take his learning as it fell as drops of wisdomfrom the lips of a gray-bearded sage. He must accept a fact because aprofessor said it was a fact . The college lecture , aside from the religioususe of a few texts, was the one source of undergraduate learning. Thus afailure to obtain good notes might, very likely, mean a greater calamityto the student than it does now.

Letusconsiderthepracticeof note takingundertwo mainheads:notesonlectures,andnotesonreading

ned the art of notetaking for themselves that this pamphletis prepared. It does not seem wise to attempt to lay down any verystringent rules on the subject. We can only suggest the more generalmethods from which every man can work out his own particular system.

Emily J. LevineAby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture:Navigating Normative Narratives,Counternarratives, and Historical Context

For some scholars, it is critical thatthis new Warburg obsessively kept tabs on antisemitic incidents on the Easternfront, scribbling down aphorisms and thoughts on scraps of paper and storingthem in Zettelkasten that are now searchable.

It is a digitizedcard index containing about 15,000 token attestations of 150 types of Greek prepositions, conjunctions andparticles in Coptic from the whole range of Coptic dialects and types of text, arranged on the basis ofa detailedanalysis of their semantic and syntactic properties. This admirable work was conducted by Gertrud Bauer towhom this article is dedicated, in the 1970s and 1980s under the auspices of Alexander Bbhlig at the University ofTubingen. With Gertrud Bauer’s kind permission to make use of her work, we scanned the originalslips and slotted them into a database replicating the hierarchical structure of the original compilation It is ourpleasure to provide the public with a new lexicographical tool which helps to cope with a particularly difficultand interesting kind of Greek loanwords in Coptic.

Tami Gottschalk,

The DDGLC data are not accessible online as of yet. A migration of the database and the data into aMySQL target system is underway and will allow us to offer an online user interface by the end of 2017 Whatwe can already offer now is a by-product of our work, the Gertrud Bauer Zettelkasten Online.6'

PeterSmith.Org is my commonplace book, covering teaching, research, technology, and whatever else takes my fancy. This site is in a constant state of development and 'becoming'.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Niklas Luhmann ever since David Seidl introduced me to his ideas. I think it was at an EGOS conference in the early 2000s.

Might not my Journal be called “Field Notes?”

to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant,—perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind,—Ishould need but one book of poetry to contain them all.

The definitive scholarly edition of the Journal is being published insixteen volumes by Princeton University Press in their series TheWritings of Henry D. Thoreau. To date, seven volumes are in print,each costing around $100; the material not yet in book form isavailable online atwww.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/writings_journals.html.

he Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 14 vols., edited by BradfordTorrey and Francis H. Allen, was first published in 1906 and iscurrently in print in a two-volume edition from Dover Books,photoreduced but easily readable; it was also reprinted by PeregrineSmith Books in 1984 with volume introductions by Walter Harding andincluding a lost volume first published by Perry Miller asConsciousness in Concord in 1958. Any of these editions is highlyrecommended for the reader who wants 6,000 more great pageswhere this book came from.

Finally, I should say that this abridgment does not claim to beobjective. I chose passages for inclusion not necessarily because oftheir importance to Thoreau’s biography, or to cultural or naturalhistory, but because I liked them: the book is shaped by my personalproclivities as much as by anything else—a preference for berryingover fishing, owls over muskrats, ice over sunsets, to name a few atrandom.

Like any journal, Thoreau’s is repetitive, which suggests naturalplaces to shorten the text but these are precisely what need to be keptin order to preserve the feel of a journal, Thoreau’s in particular. Itrimmed many of Thoreau’s repetitions but kept them wheneverpossible, because they are important to Thoreau and because theyare beautiful. Sometimes he repeats himself because he is drafting,revising, constructing sentences solid enough to outlast the centuries.

Sometimes, Isuspect, he copied his own words because he liked to copy: no one’scommonplace books could run to a million words—those are just theones that survive, in addition to a two-million-word Journal, andenormous quantities of other writing—without a sheer love of sittingwith pen in hand, a printed book and a blank page both open before

Jan. 22. To set down such choice experiences that my own writingsmay inspire me and at last I may make wholes of parts. Certainly it isa distinct profession to rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentimentsand thoughts which visit all men more or less generally, that thecontemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmoniouscompletion. Associate reverently and as much as you can with yourloftiest thoughts. Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is anest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentallythrown together become a frame in which more may be developedand exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, ofkeeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulateourselves. My thoughts are my company. They have a certainindividuality and separate existence, aye, personality. Having bychance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought theminto juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it waspossible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.

Equations and Formulas in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry Using a Digital Zettelkasten .t3_10dbza7._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } zk-structureHow do you handle relations between mathematical, physical or chemical formulas in a digital Zettelkasten? Since I would like to use a future-proof system, my files are written in markdown.Is it possible to write down those formulas on a tablet and save the pdfs inside the digital Zettelkasten (along with a new ID and a descriptive title) and then just reference on it from the markdown Zettel? Or should I create attachments for markdown Zettel that require some formulas or images providing the *same* ID to them?Or, do I completely overthinking this?

May 19, 2004 #1 Hello everyone here at the forum. I want to thank everyone here for all of the helpful and informative advice on GTD. I am a beginner in the field of GTD and wish to give back some of what I have received. What is posted below is not much of tips-and-tricks I found it very helpful in understanding GTD. The paragraphs posted below are from the book Lila, by Robert Pirsig. Some of you may have read the book and some may have not. It’s an outstanding read on philosophy. Robert Pirsig wrote his philosophy using what David Allen does, basically getting everything out of his head. I found Robert Pirsigs writing on it fascinating and it gave me a wider perspective in using GTD. I hope you all enjoy it, and by all means check out the book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Thanks everyone. arthur

Ut_opinor December 2020 Flag With respect, I think y'all have it backwards. The important word is not "Zettel", but "Kasten." That is the key to the system and the brilliant insight Luhmann was able to exploit in devising his system. First, as an American (and, more particularly, a Californian), I must object to the casual use of "slip" in talking about the Zettel. "Slip" and "slip-box" are British English; as you know, George Bernard Shaw remarked that America and England were separated by a common language. So, here. In American English, it is a piece of paper. We understand "slip of paper," of course, but it would not likely occur to an American to say it. At the most, we might say "a little (or small) piece of paper." That is not really the point. Looking at actual pictures of Luhmann's Zettelkasten shows that it is simply what used to be called a card catalogue; more broadly, a card file index. They used to be a prominent feature of libraries. They included what we now call metadata about publications. They also had call numbers (in America; shelf numbers elsewhere) that were used to get the book. Sometimes, the book was fetched by a library employee. Now, some call it the UID. Same idea, same purpose, same occasionally-odd result. And, if you got to go into the stacks where the books were shelved, the same serendipity could lead to interesting discoveries. Simply, Luhmann's flash of brilliance was to see that his own reading and thoughts constituted his academic library, and his work involved gleaning what he could from those sources. Since he created the sources, which were always his own thoughts based on his reading and thinking, he could use the results directly in drafting his writings, which is why he was so productive. The Zettelkasten is just his own, personal card catalogue, where he gathered his research material. The key to success was the reference system he devised, just like the Dewey decimal system used by American libraries, and whatever similar reference system is used by libraries elsewhere. The main thing is that each research item has a unique identifier that allows it to be located as desired. I say that Kasten is the important word, rather than Zettel, because it was the fact that the material--notes, files, cards, little pieces of paper, matchbook covers, whatever--was all together in one place and available for research and thinking that made the difference. Luhmann was not the first to write notes down compulsively, nor to keep them; he did figure out a system for finding them when he needed or could use them. Luhmann's success was that he saw clearly what was right in front of him, and he understood how to take advantage of it. (The essence of genius is to not look surprised when the lightning strikes.) In his system, there are three important steps: capture, corral, and ride. And if the horse wants to run away with you, let it. You never know when it might stumble across a gold mine in the desert. Yippie-ki-yay, Cowboys!

Zettelkasten for studying art?

In summer 2010, Professor Peter Nagel of Bonn forwarded seven cardboard boxes full of lexicographical slips to the DDGLC office, which had been handed over to him in the early '90s by the late Professor Alexander Böhlig.

The development of the Gertrud Bauer Zettelkasten Online was funded 2010 – 2015 by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Gertrud-und-Alexander-Böhlig-Stiftung.

Thanks to funding from the Gertrud-und-AlexanderBöhlig Stiftung, it was possible to inspect the content of the boxes, and to re-establish the original order of the lexicographical slips and their internal hierarchical structure.

The original slips have been scanned and slotted into a database replicating the hierarchical structure of the original compilation. It is our pleasure to provide a new lexicographical tool to our colleagues in Coptology, Classical Studies, and Linguistics, and other interested parties.

The huge collection of lexicographical slips underlying this publication was produced in the '70s and '80s for Prof. Alexander Böhlig's loanword project at the University of Tuebingen.

Her work on borrowed function words was so far manifest in her Konkordanz der nichtflektierten griechischen Wörter im bohairischen Neuen Testament, Göttinger Orientforschungen VI/6, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1975, the tip of the iceberg as we know now.

these slips constitute a thorough lexicographical compilation of about 15.000 attestations (tokens) of almost 150 types of Greek prepositions, conjunctions and particles in Coptic, from virtually all Coptic dialects and types of texts, arranged on the basis of a detailed analysis of their semantic and syntactic properties. It is the work of Dr. Gertrud Bauer from Tuebingen.

What is Coptic?Coptic is the name of the last phase (ca. 300 CE - 1300 CE) of the longest-attested human language yet available to linguistic study, the Ancient Egyptian lan­guage. Closely connected to the Christian population of Egypt, Coptic is one of the most important languages of ancient Christian literature, alongside Greek, Latin and Syriac. A great deal of Biblical and early Christian literature was translated into Coptic for Egyptian consumption, while an autochthnous Coptic Christian literature flourished for centuries.

Withtheotherpiece ofpracticaladviceinthearticleinthe Lancet,namely,that studentsshould securewellboundsubstantialnote-books,wethoroughly concur.Theyshouldbewellbound andsubstantialinorder tobeavailableforreferencein futureyears

Tobeuseful,thenotestakenatmedicallecturesshouldbeasummaryonly;noattempt shouldbemadetotakeaverbatimreport

This independent confirmation ofthe testimonythat Dr Gowers has personally borne to the helpfulness ofPhonography in his professional career, is peculiarlyvaluable, because there are still some able men in themedical world who discourage the practice of note- takingby students . Professor Struthers, for instance, is reportedto have said before the General Medical Council that" the student takes his notes, puts his book in his pocket,and walks out, knowing no more about the subject than amere reporter would do."

He points out that the power of takingnotes efficiently does not come by nature, but that,it is an art that improves with cultivation,

NOTE-TAKING IN MEDICAL STUDYAND PRACTICE

Index card carrying case

Love these PKM-guru wars: lobbing strawman arguments at people in lengthy, rambling articles. Don't take the bait, Tiago!

As someone new to the PKM scene the jargon I see in many posts here is driving me nuts lol.

How do you generate unique notes? I feel weird to just copying ideas from books

But you should also be aware that current PKM theory has a hard-on for writing all your notes in your own words which, to me, seems like a limitation of "knowledge management" as compared to "information management". I'm fine excerpting and citing because some texts have better phrasing I could ever have.

The most famous "active" reader of great books I know isPresident Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule ofbusiness activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes,when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of makingintelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories' on the margins. When thathappens, he puts the book down. He knows he's too tired to read, and he's just wastingtime.

Ryan Randall @ryanrandall@hcommons.socialEarnest but still solidifying #pkm take:The ever-rising popularity of personal knowledge management tools indexes the need for liberal arts approaches. Particularly, but not exclusively, in STEM education.When people widely reinvent the concept/practice of commonplace books without building on centuries of prior knowledge (currently institutionalized in fields like library & information studies, English, rhetoric & composition, or media & communication studies), that's not "innovation."Instead, we're seeing some unfortunate combination of lost knowledge, missed opportunities, and capitalism selectively forgetting in order to manufacture a market.

Here are two personal sites that I found in the last couple of days. One I find fascinating for its ambition of totalization, the other for its simplicity and design. Chris Aldrich Andy Bell

It would actually be nice if there were some negative things that went along with conscientiousness, but at this point it’s emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan. It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how people do.— How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

It has been democratized with Sönke Ahrens’ bestseller: How to Take Smart Notes.

Originally, it was the note-taking method used by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist.

Expansion is led by focus. By taking time to edit, carve up, and refactor our notes, we put focus on ideas. This starts the Great Wheel of Positive Feedback. All hail to the Great Wheel of Positive Feedback.

202301041111 Making family podcast with kids

my movie ticket anecdote: I have a box of movie tickets from over the years and just holding each one I can tell you about that day, what theater I went to, a lot of details that would be totally lost with a bunch of markdown files. I really think the physical card aspect is crucial

If it interests you, GPC lists phrases like dysgu ar gof. This page then gives the example, "Yn yr hen ddyddiau byddai pobl yn dysgu cerddi ar gof" - like saying "to learn by heart" in English.

I began by committing the basic error of writing my notes on both sides of the page. I soon learned not to do that, but I continued to copy excerpts into notebooks in the order in which I encountered them.

record-keeping of animal behaviour in systematic units of time and incorporating at least one verb.

Cuneiform account keeping began with numerical signs in Uruk-phase Sumer (Schmandt-Besserat Reference Schmandt-Besserat1996), which by the Late Uruk period formed the precursor for writing in its combination of numerals and associated images (Englund Reference Englund, Radner and Robson2011), exactly what we have identified.

Record keeping using small clay ‘tokens’ was present in the Near Eastern Neolithic in the tenth millennium bc, these objects widespread and abundant by the sixth millennium bc, and by the fourth millennium bc it is clear they were functioning, perhaps as generalized elements for simple counting tasks recording time, resources and the like, albeit among other functions that did not have a mnemonic function (Bennison-Chapman Reference Bennison-Chapman2018, 240).

Sumerologists place the origins of the development of writing around 3300 bc in the pictograms associated with abstract marks representing numbers; ‘the writing system invented or developed … of a pictographic character; its signs were drawings’ and cuneiform gradually developed out of this, which ‘is a script, not a language’ (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999, 10: our emphases).

One common definition of ‘writing’ is that it is written language, i.e. not only acts as a notational system but one which has a connection to the phonetic form of the language spoken by the writer (Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop1999).

An additional affordance of <Y> is that it may be the first known example of an ‘action‘ word, i.e. a verb (‘to give birth’), although we acknowledge that this is ambiguous: it could function as a noun, ‘birth’, or ‘place of birth’.

The value of <Y>, the position of which varies in the sequences, may be the precursor of place value, in which, for example, 5, 50 and 500 represent different values according to their position, thought to have been a Sumerian invention (d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017).

A visual system such as this allowed observations to be accumulated with less unreliability than orally, and hence provided a degree of estimation of annual variability of these phenomena, and presumably to be embedded into wider artistic and behavioural and mythic contexts.

We believe that we have demonstrated the use of abstract marks to convey meaning about the behaviour of the animals with which they are associated, on European Upper Palaeolithic material culture spanning the period from ~37,000 to ~13,000 bp. In our reading, the animals integral to our analytical modules do not depict a specific individual animal, but all animals of that species, at least as experienced by the images’ creators. This synthesis of image, mathematical syntax (the ordinal/linear sequences) and signs functioning as words formed an efficient means of recording and communicating information that has at its heart the core intellectual achievement of abstraction.

We believe that the numeric notational marks associated with the animals constituted a calendar, and given that it references natural behaviour in terms of seasons relative to a fixed point in time, we may refer to it as a phenological calendar, with a meteorological basis.

The requirement, in ordinal representations of number, that the ‘special’ symbol at the ordinal position of the value being represented must be distinct from all other symbols in a sequence clearly invites a meaning to be associated with the special symbol. With such, there was no longer the need for a purely oral explanation of the system, as all of its components were self-contained to the point of being readable many thousands of years later.

We have proposed the existence of a notational system associated with an unambiguous animal subject, relating to biologically significant events informed by the ethological record, which allows us for the first time to understand a Palaeolithic notational system in its entirety. This utilized/allowed the function of ordinality (and, later, place value), which were revolutionary steps forward in information recording.

We found no statistically significant predictors of either Spring or Autumn migration periods.

For fish, the number of marks in sequences with and without <Y> correlates markedly with the spring migration and hatching.

It seems fairly clear that the concern with sequences associated with birds was to convey the availability of eggs.

Finally, statistics should reinforce the fact that any patterning found cannot be explained as accidental.

relative to bonne saison or RBS

Anecdotally

Our analytical groups are: aurochs, birds, bison, caprids, cervids, fish, horses, mammoths, rhinos. Because of exceptionally low numbers we exclude snakes and wolverines. We also omitted sequences associated with apparent human depictions, or images in which such were part, in order to treat these separately at a later date.

We appreciate this is a long span of time, and were concerned why any specific artificial memory system should last for so long.

After omitting any problematic examples (e.g. those with ambiguous numbers of marks or unclear taxonomic identification of associated images), these totalled 606 sequences without <Y> and 256 sequences with <Y>, largely from France and Spain, with some examples from further to the east (Table 1 and Supplementary Material). Chronologically they span the Early to Late Upper Palaeolithic, with the vast majority of examples in the latter.

The obvious event is the so-called ‘bonne saison’, a French zooarchaeological term for the time at the end of winter when rivers unfreeze, the snow melts, and the landscape begins to green. This of course varies by several weeks from the south to the north of Europe, but corresponds approximately to late spring. We hypothesize that spring, therefore, with its obvious signals of the end of winter and corresponding faunal migrations to breeding grounds, would have provided an obvious, if regionally differing, point of origin for the lunar calendar.

The sequences of dots/lines associated with animal images certainly meet the criteria for representing numbers: they are usually organized in registers that are horizontal relative to the image with which they appear to be associated, and are of regular (rather than random) size and spacing, akin to the notion of a Mental Number Line being central to the development of mathematical abilities (Brannon Reference Brannon2006; Dehaene et al. Reference Dehaene, Bossini and Giraux1993; Pinel et al. Reference Pinel, Piazza, Le Bihan and Dehaene2004; Previtali et al. Reference Previtali, Rinaldi and Girelli2011; Tang et al. Reference Tang, Ward and Butterworth2008).

Francesco d'Errico has done much to advance our understanding of artificial/ external memory systems.

These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021).

We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies.

Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication.