It's also similar to the Old Hungarian alphabet. Some of the symbols seem to be the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Hungarian_alphabet

That was my impression as well (I am likely biased - I'm Hungarian). What's your nationality if I may ask?

They look very much like early British/Norse runes too.

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins presumably?

> Reminds me of the also unbroken Indus script. With all this computational power, I'm surprised that we haven't been able to crack ancient proto-writing.

Attempts to crack the Indus script with the aid of computers have been made since at least the 1970s (a large Soviet team went to work on it then), but the problem is that the Indus script may not actually encode the sounds of a language. If it is essentially a set of tamgas or decorative elements, then it cannot be cracked. And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.

> And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.

I feel this conclusion rather weak.

As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed [1]. Another one is the hieroglyphs.

Re-constructing how mayan words sounded is still on-going [2].

Also, this type of work is not really possible to "crack with computers" as some have suggested (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment

2: https://decipherment.wordpress.com/

> As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed

That is no counterexample. The Mayan written language was related to a number of surviving languages, making decipherment easier.

> Another one is the hieroglyphs.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs could not be deciphered until the discovery of the Rosetta stone, where the hieroglyphic text was accompanied by translations into Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Before that, there had been attempts for many centuries to decipher the hieroglyphs but they proved fruitless.

The people that decoded the mayan language had the advantage of having several actively spoken maya languages to work from.

The main problem as I understand is that although there are a thousand examples of Indus texts, the longest one is 17 characters. And there are no bilingual inscriptions.

But I do wonder if there isn't a side channel, or just some way of doing it without requiring the usual necessary elements.

I wonder if anyone’s trying to decipher non human communication (dolphins, elephants).

They've been claiming this one for years though.

However, IF they crack it, it's going to be a game changer; Unlike apes, Dolphins have a much more complex vocal language. As humans we'll be forced to re-evaluate our position on the sentient species ladder.

Of course, this'll all be for nought if the Vogons get here first and all the Dolphins disappear.

> As humans we'll be forced to re-evaluate our position on the sentient species ladder.

I bet that we will just keep trying hard to kill all of them to regain our top position.

Cats.. dogs?

I wonder if our brains have changed so much since then, that we may not be able to comprehend what the symbols originally meant.

Why would "our brains" change? Because we have tv and phones?

Nah, because now we have agrarian civilizations as opposed to tribes of hunter gatherers.

Indus script was used by the Indus Valley Civilization, an agrarian civilization.

That seems just as much of a change as phones and Internet, seen from the perspective of a brain changing... Last time I checked.. Astronauts do not struggle with farming potatoes on Mars?

We see the world differently. IE what was a 100 IQ, 100 years ago would be sub standard today because we have new ways of thinking that allow us to do better abstraction. Plus the we've changed how we see the world. Blue is a relatively new color. It is a recent distinction between what most cultures saw as green.