The Phaistos Disc and Innate Geometry in Humans even Independent of Language: Indigenous Amazon Tribe of Mundurucu Understands Basic Concepts of Parallel Lines

BBC News on Science and Environment reports on a recent study, Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group, by Véronique Izard, Pierre Pica, Elizabeth S. Spelke, and Stanislas Dehaene published (as edited by Charles R. Gallistel, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The free Abstract of the article, the full text of which requires subscription or payment, provides inter alia as follows:

"... The responses of Mundurucu adults and children converged with that of mathematically educated adults and children and revealed an intuitive understanding of essential properties of Euclidean geometry. For instance, on a surface described to them as perfectly planar, the Mundurucu's estimations of the internal angles of triangles added up to 180 degrees, and when asked explicitly, they stated that there exists one single parallel line to any given line through a given point. These intuitions were also partially in place in the group of younger US participants. We conclude that, during childhood, humans develop geometrical intuitions that spontaneously accord with the principles of Euclidean geometry, even in the absence of training in mathematics." [emphasis added]

This study is of importance for my alleged decipherment of the Phaistos Disc as posing a "pre-Euclidean" postulate of parallel lines, i.e. a proposed "mathematical" content which has been summarily dismissed out of hand without serious consideration by mainstream scholars as something that simply could not have been in an Ancient Greek era more than a thousand years prior to Euclid.

Based on this study of an indigenous Amazonian group, the authors of the PNAS article conclude that certain basic geometric understanding, even concerning parallel lines, exists in cultures who do not even have fixed geometric concepts in their language.

Accordingly, the early date for the pre-Euclidean parallel postulate which my decipherment of the Phaistos Disc mandates is no longer as improbable as it might have appeared prior to this Amazonian tribe study.

We should never underestimate the ancients' innate geometric understanding.

LexiLine: History of Civilization: One New Member Comments

A new member at LexiLine, my newsletter group on the History of Civilization (515 members currently), just wrote:

"I am a Christian amateur astronomer Wow. I mean WOW!!! What a staggering massive amount of research! Thank you so much for making this available."

Here was my reply, that tangents on ancient world study generally:

"Thank YOU!

So many people dismiss pioneer research because it is -- as I know myself -- speculative in many aspects, without understanding the tremendous amount of work that some of these things require. Just drawing the megalithic astronomy illustrations takes immense amounts of time, pixel by pixel, regardless of the analysis itself, which is another question of tremendous time investment.

If I had devoted all this time to making money, you can be sure I would be a very rich man. I worked at a stock brokerage as a college student and I know how to do it. But that is just it. Once I knew how it was done, I was off to other things where knowledge was less certain.

The same is true for my background in law, which is easy for me as a discipline as I take to it naturally. Partners at my old law firm in New York average an annual salary of several million dollars a year.

Deciphering ancient history is a horse of a different color, but with rewards that can not be measured in dollars, even though people gravitate to gold where they find it, but that is not the point. Ancient historical study is like being on an endless treasure hunt, with one new treasure following the next, at least, so it is at the current time, with so many errors in mainstream theories.

I suppose the treasure-hunt aspect is why so many archaeologists and students of Biblical history are so fascinated by this field and why so many "adventurers" and alleged "amateurs" have been the ones to make the major finds and decipherments in this field of inquiry. Indiana Jones lives.

Again, thank YOU for making my day.

- Andis

Andis Kaulins"

History and Law: The Essence is the Same: Jonathan Sumption, Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom

As someone who writes about the history of civilization from an evidentiary standpoint, I am gratified to have found an allied voice in the sometimes vast wasteland of scholarship:

“The essence of law is to strip away the vast proportion of facts and what you’re left with usually supplies the answer. History is exactly the same.”

- Jonathan Sumption (just appointed to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, author of a "narrative history of the hundred years’ war, so far numbering three volumes, [which] has been praised as “a masterpiece” by Frederic Raphael and “an enterprise on a truly Victorian scale” by Allan Massie")

This gift of reducing things to their essence is sometimes not shared by people in the humanities, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and related historical professions such as Egyptology, Assyriology and Biblical scholarship and is one reason why those fields are marked in part by pervasive and colossal mainstream errors that still need to be corrected down the road.