As I sat down to write his post I wondered “what is the oldest sport?” I know you know that answer. Wrestling.
Wrestling was first documented in 15,300 BCE in the cave drawing below (left). (How they figured out that this depicts wrestling is beyond me.) Skiing is newer, having first been documented in 6,000 BCE (drawing on the right).
Folks who study cave drawings note that there are 32 symbols that show up in cave drawings across the globe – in India, Europe, North America, Africa, China, Australia, and South America. A type of universal “proto-language.” The language probably spread with humans that left Africa and traversed the planet.
It’s impressive that the symbols lasted that long. Humans left Africa 130,00 to 70,000 years ago. They showed up in Australia 45,000 years ago. Hence these symbols were in use for tens of thousands of years.
Nobody knows what the symbols mean. This gives room for lots of speculation. For example, one archeologist thinks that the symbols were made during hallucinogenic trips that were part of shamanic rituals. Others think that the Y represents the vulva/fertility. Who knows.
A more contemporary attempt to communicate – this time across planets – is the plaque below which was placed on the Pioneer 10 and 11 satellites launched in 1972 and 1973 respectively. They were the first satellites to leave the solar system.
It was a complicated process to determine what to include on the plaque. You can see the naked man and woman with the man’s arm raised as a sign of peace and welcoming. The shape behind them shows how large we are relative to the size of the satellite. The star figure is an attempt to show where the solar system is in our galaxy with the bottom figure showing which planet in the solar system originated the satellite.
The figure at the top left represents the “hyperfine transition of hydrogen” which is supposed to indicate units of measurement that can used to figure out, from the star figure, more accurately the location of the solar system.
In effect his plaque is an inter-galactic address book .
It may take a while before we know if any extraterrestrials find the plaques and decide to send a message back. Pioneer 10 is expected to reach its destination constellation in 2,000,000 years and Pioneer 11 will reach its destination in 4,000,000 years. The newspaper headline (1920) suggests that we don’t have to go that far to find aliens.
A less advanced approach (although it might have been effective) to communicating with extraterrestrials was proposed by Joseph Johann Littrow in 1819. He suggested that we use the Sahara as a sort of blackboard. Giant trenches several hundred yards wide could delineate twenty-mile-wide shapes. Then the trenches would be filled with water, and then enough kerosene could be poured on top of the water to burn for six hours. Using this method, a different signal could be sent every night.