It is well-studied area, eg see references in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865246/ . Apparently 2 years olds can interpret images.
That said, I don’t think that the conventions of tone mapping require a lot of learning: the brain interprets local changes and most images are fine with that. In fact, people can visually interpret “linear” images, it’s just that they look flat or lack details, what we have “learned” is to expect better from most photographs.
I don’t doubt that. 
My question concerned what Bastian wrote about the inability of non-technical societies to interpret images/photos. The fact that a baby cannot do that does not necessarily mean it’s because they have not been exposed to enough images; it could also mean their brains are not developed enough. An child or adult in a non-technical society is also exposed to images, whether they are sketches drawn in the dust or some other form (in fact, such sketches and simple tribal drawings, cave paintings are way more abstract than than even a black-and-white photo.
Even if they were unable to draw perspective, does that really imply they would not have been able to interpret it, had they been shown such images?
Perhaps we needed cities and roads to discover the rules that allowed us to draw perspective: parallels meeting at infinity.
And our discussion started not with perspective, but rather with tones: mapping the ‘infinite’/huge DR of reality to the rather limited DR of displays and prints.
A fascinating question, that I don’t have the answer to (I don’t think that anyone has a hard experimental answer, as it is very hard to find people today who were not exposed to photographs, and I imagine that they would learn to intepret them very quickly).
But regarding
I would assume that any society that has line drawing (the extreme form of dynamic range compression) would recognize objects in photos.
The eye can definitely handle very compressed dynamic range, eg try contrast 0.5, 0.3, and 0.1 in sigmoid. The first one is OK, but even the last one remains discernible. It is just unusual to our eyes.
And let’s be careful about units:
For power, double is +3 dB
For pressure or voltage, double is +6 dB.
Ah… yes, that’s caught me out a few times in my other hobby of amateur radio. Power is the most commonly used, but obviously the others come up as well.
I’m not a particularly technical ham, (otherwise I’d be more familiar with it!) but I do cross paths with dB on a fairly frequent basis…
No, the first life forms did no lay eggs. So, eggs second.
Something not a “chicken” laid an egg that contained the genetic information to create the first chicken. So the egg was first. 
Yes, that 's right 
. But you mentioned “evolution” and there the egg was invented later.
Me not providing the right context was subpar - so right on topic your perception was different. =)
Actually the food market came first, because that’s where eggs come from. There’s a cooler in the back full of 'em.
Just sayin’… 