thought for the day/more human beginnings

From the origin of life there's lots that can be talked about.  There was lots of life long before humans.  I note that humans evolved from its pre-human state and so the question is how does human intelligence relate to pre-human intelligence.  I note that learning is evolving.  Life evolves; life is intelligence to some extent.  That's all I want to say about much of that life here on this blog.  This takes me back to those Latoli footprints.  Back then, we didn't leave much artifacts except for a few stone tools that are hard to distinguish from comman rocks and our own bones.  That's what I really wanted to say about those footprints.  That's all they left for us to dig up at that time; but, that doesn't mean they weren't intelligent.  They had little to start with to work on and generalize.  Those are our beginnings.  I want to go a bit further in this post actually.

After those footprints, it's another long stretch of time. I like to think that they were developing the elaborate language vocabulary during this time. The next significant period of mankind appears to be cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago. 

Again, one can see daming up nature to a certain extent.  I would think that those who did the cave paintings also painted outdoors.  But those paintings always got washed away.  So, some figured out how to make them last - paint in the caves! They painted as well as the Egyptians of tens of thousands of years later.  I choose the painting of their hands because for me this is symbolic of consciousness.

But, I want to add something else from this period.  Tally sticks.  Animal bones apparently written on by those cave painters(or people of the same time period).  The writing most people would assume to be counting.  So, we know these people were doing mathematics way back then. 

I think this is enough for now.