20,000-Year-Old Cave Paintings were a Proto-Writing System

The cave paintings such as the ones found in Lascaux and Pech Merle in southwest France, and the El Castillo Cave in Spain, are well known for their remarkable cave paintings. Now, the artwork is being considered as more than just early painting; researchers believe the paintings are an early proto-writing system, dating back at least 14,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, was led by independent researcher Ben Bacon, and involved senior academics from Durham University and University College London (UCL).

For a long time, archeologists have recognized that the sequences of lines, dots and other marks found among the pictures of animals in more than 600 images on cave walls meant something. The study concludes that the Ice Age hunters used the paintings to record and share information about the behavior of the species represented. By using the birth cycles of equivalent animals as a reference point, the team could worked out that the number of marks associated with each animal species was a record, by lunar month, of when they were mating and that the “Y” sign in the markings represented giving birth.

Looking at the total number of marks — either dots or lines — found in sequences across hundreds of caves, the researchers discovered that none of the series contained more than 13 marks, consistent with the 13 lunar months in each year.

“The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them, using a similar approach that others took to understanding an early form of Greek text.

“Using information and imagery of cave art available via the British Library and on the internet, I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns.

“As the study progressed, I reached out to friends and senior university academics, whose expertise were critical to proving my theory.

“It was surreal to sit in the British Library and slowly work out what people 20,000 years ago were saying but the hours of hard work were certainly worth it.”
Ben Bacon

The results of the study indicate that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar — a record of early time keeping that would eventually become commonplace.

“The implications are that Ice Age hunter-gatherers didn’t simply live in their present, but recorded memories of the time when past events had occurred and used these to anticipate when similar events would occur in the future, an ability that memory researchers call mental time-travel.”
Prof Robert Kentridge, Durham Universit

Not all academics agree on the findings especially the meaning of the Y shapes, but it’s fascinating to think that these marks, left so long ago, can provide insights into what our ancient answers thought and cared about.

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