Reminds me of Prometheus (2012 Alien prequel) 17 minutes and 50 seconds in.

we've had a good millennium for humans

40,000 years is 40 chances at other good milleniums occurring

Where cultures weren't using metals as the primary basis of infrastructure, there wouldn't be much evidence remaining of those cultures. Add in glaciers and everything is ground up, except in caves.

It's not impossible that there's something here, but I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists.

I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.

I would prefer to see pictures of these symbols, and their in-situ neighbors, and a corresponding symbol across a wide distance that's within at most 2-300 years.

We want to feel that language has commonalities, that people traveled long distances and times and kept some common bond. It might even make intuitive sense, if the people share cultural similarities. But it often results in linguists making motivated decisions without enough evidence, like happened with the "Altaic"[1] language family.

[0] https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/m... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_l...

This is junk science. The illustration is absolutely bonkers: https://cdn8.openculture.com/2019/02/28230224/cavedoodles.jp...

It's literally a bunch of graphic design output showing clean font glyphs! Needless to say, there is no, I mean zero evidence of any kind of symbology of the fidelity being shown. You'll get a petroglyph here or there, and that's it. Stretching those across whole continents and inferring "language" is just ridiculous.

This is, like mid-tier video game art.

Maybe the context where in the cave the symbol has been found could indicate what it meant. Furthermore symbols could be related to the surroundings of the cave to give future cave dwellers information about the area.

These aren't a "language" they're called entoptics or phosphenes. Calling this a language is like the other posts here, is pseudoscience.

Entoptics are actual neural gradient patterns of the retina and occipital externalized, from altered states, light-deprivation, trances even extreme expression.

Entoptics are well enough researched (Lewis-Williams, Entoptics: The Signs of All Times) that any New Scientist writer should have at least mentioned this.