Homo Naledi at IFIASA 2023, Romania https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh_Vmm78v_M , 43 minutes 24 A full presentation of Homo Naledi and what he means for archaeology and anthropology. He buried his dead in underground caves. He inscribed symbolic hashtags and other geometric forms on the walls of the main burial chamber over the graves. He had reached the first stage of symbolic writing, the engravings representing a few ritualistic oral formulas. Just one step before symbolical signs for phonemes and/or syllables, the opening gate to alphabetical writing. The development of Writing at IFIASA 2023, Romania https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Ak77DFPoo, 51 minutes 29 A full presentation of what happened after the lecture on Homo Naledi, moving from symbolical non-representational mostly geometric inscriptions and engravings to symbolical signs for phonemes and syllables that lead to alphabetical writing, a generally progressive evolution with cases like Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs that kept their old Holistic representational structures and yet became phonetic for syllables or ancillary "words." What is writing the extension of, in Marshall McLuhan's line?

2. TWO VIDEOS FOR THOSE
WHO LIKE CONTROVERSY
The following two videos could be two lectures delivered to students who are looking
for some light on the phylogeny of language, not the origin because such a question has
no sense, but the long phylogenetic process that enabled Homo Sapiens along with
anterior Hominins to inherit whatever calls composed with consonantal and vocalic sounds
articulated together into clusters that were communicational messages to other members
of the animal communities, into a fully articulated language with a lexicon, a morphology, a
syntax, and a semantic architecture, along with all sorts of other means to produce direct
communication, and at times this oral production was marked with rhythm, sound effects,
“figures of speech,” and other elements that we would consider today poetic, hence
artistic.
The main idea along this line is that at every step of this long phylogenetic process,
the state reached by articulated language is a development of the previous step, hence a
post-gression and the same step is also the potential of what is going to come next, hence
a pro-gression. Alphabetical writing is the pro-gression after the simple engravings of
holistic symbolical forms or patterns inscribed in caves by Homo Naledi in 300,000 BCE,
or the very similar inscriptions that Homo Neanderthals left behind in some cave in
Gibraltar in 100,000 BCE, and what Homo Sapiens will leave behind in Europe and
Indonesia, and probably many other places in the world, in 50,000 BCE maximum in
backward movement, and then constantly after this date. At that moment in this linguistic
phylogeny, the three Hominin species had reached – at these very different dates – the
same level of development of symbolism, of transcribing full expressions, phrases, and
sentences into some simple geometric forms we cannot imagine to be alphabetical. But
that was the first step towards writing, in fact, the last step before alphabetical writing.
It is now amazing to see how all the established professors in a large number of
established universities reject the ten years of work of a team working for National

3. Geographic. And why are they so vicious in their exposing denunciation, and so fast?
Because what has been discovered, filmed, studied, and analyzed by an important team of
explorers is endangering their established theories about Homo Sapiens being the
absolute first and only human to have buried their dead, inscribed anything on their cave
walls, etc. Unluckily for them, no matter how much, and a lot, established they might be, it
does not fit with the data we have now. There sure is a lot more work to do, a lot more
dating to perform, but Homo Sapiens was not the first one, and certainly not the only one.
Oral communication started a long time before Hominins, with monkeys for example, to
keep within the limits of clusters of vowels and consonants, and clicks are consonants of
some type we ignore in the West though we use clicks to call the chickens on farms, or to
reprobate a child who is doing something unwise. The vanity and the vain glory of being a
university professor – defending their positions as being unquestionable – are the main
two ventricles of any institution that will have to change anyway, and accept that the old
theories were not in any way laws of nature but only the highest level their minds had
reached with absolutely no proof that there was no point higher, because science is like
Jack’s Beanstalk, reaching into the sky, the cosmos.
Remember Bryan Sykes and his Seven Daughters of Eve (2001) and the tremendous
amount of time to bring the American absolute-truth holders on the DNA in Europe to
admit that only 25% of European DNA was from the New Europeans, id est the Indo-
Europeans, whereas 75% of European DNA was from the Old Europeans, the
agglutinative-language-speaking Turkic first Homo Sapiens population in Europe (alone in
Europe from 50,000 BCE to at best 10,000 BCE). The Indo-Europeans started arriving at
best again, that is to say at most in the past, around 10,000 BCE and the whole of Europe
will be under their influence not before 6-5,000 BCE, maybe slightly later.
How long did it take Yury Valentinovich Knorozov to be heard on Maya alphabetical
and syllabary writing, even in the oldest forms of it? About a good 25 years, thanks to the
Cold War. The master was Eric Thompson who believed the glyphs were nothing but
artistic decoration, at best mnemonic symbols. For Homo Naledi, it will take a good ten
more years.
And Silvia Ferrara and her established idea that the writing of a language has nothing
to do with the language itself and has its own logic, full stop and period, “and do not mix
me with your own views.” Its own logic, maybe yes, at the surface of things. But if the
symbols used for the phonemes and the syllables do not correspond to very specific
phonemes and syllables, the clusters of symbols are useless and meaningless. The
meaning of the writing system is in the architectures of the language concerned: phonetic,
morphological, syntactic, and semantic architectures. Just the same way as a language is
“a system of systems,” according to Antoine Meillet or Gustave Guillaume, the writing
system of a language reflects the “system of systems” of the language with all sorts of
marks for functions and conjugations, and with numerous rules for agreement between the
elements in a sentence. So much so, that in many writing systems, the various letters have
names, and when these names are meaningful words, like in the Celtic Ogham alphabet,
or Scandinavian and Germanic Runic alphabets, and many others, the sound concerned
by this letter that has a meaningful lexical name is the initial sound of this name. In the
Ogham Celtic alphabet, the twenty initial names of letters are all trees, and the letter is the
first sound of these names, and no surprise that all the letters are extremely schematic,
hence symbolic of trees with a trunk, vertical or horizontal, and one to five branches jutting
out on one side or/and the other, perpendicular or oblique. She can check it in Ireland,
even if nowadays practically no one uses this alphabet anymore. It was durable and lasted

4. something like fifteen centuries but not sustainable and it was pushed aside by the Latin
alphabet, thanks to the Christianization of Ireland by Benedictine monks.
So, fare thee well in the jungle of these “lectures” that are in their original forms, with
some mistakes, probably, and some mispronunciation now and then. Let me know what
you think and amplify the distribution as much as you can.
Homo Naledi at IFIASA 2023, Romania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh_Vmm78v_M, 43 minutes 24
A full presentation of Homo Naledi and what he means for archaeology and anthropology.
He buried his dead in underground caves. He inscribed symbolic hashtags and other
geometric forms on the walls of the main burial chamber over the graves. He had reached the
first stage of symbolic writing, the engravings representing a few ritualistic oral formulas. Just
one step before symbolical signs for phonemes and/or syllables, the opening gate to
alphabetical writing.

5. The development of Writing at IFIASA
2023, Romania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Ak77DFPoo, 51 minutes 29
A full presentation of what happened after the lecture on Homo Naledi, moving from
symbolical non-representational mostly geometric inscriptions and engravings to symbolical
signs for phonemes and syllables that lead to alphabetical writing, a generally progressive
evolution with cases like Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs that kept their old Holistic
representational structures and yet became phonetic for syllables or ancillary "words." What is
writing the extension of, in Marshall McLuhan's line?