Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought. …
Read the full news article at BBC News
A writing system lost for 3,000 years has been rediscovered on an ancient stone tablet in Mexico, archaeologists say. The tablet is the earliest example of writing in the New World, pushing back the origins of writing in the region by several hundred years, according to a paper that will appear in tomorrow’s edition of the journal Science.
Read the full article at National Geographic
Writing systems may look very different, but they all use the same basic building blocks of familiar natural shapes, reports Roger Highfield. The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognising them. We use certain letters because our brains are particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they reflect common facets of the natural world.
Read the full article at Telegraph
In a new study forthcoming in the May 2006 issue of The American Naturalist, Mark A. Changizi and his coauthors, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo, from the California Institute of Technology explore the hypothesis that human visual signs have been cross-culturally selected to reflect common contours in natural scenes that humans have evolved to be good at seeing.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
No Comments - Add a comment