An early writing system used by Ice Age hunter-gatherers appears to have been discovered by an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old marks were a form of the lunar calendar.
Research suggests that rock drawings were not only a form of artistic expression, but were also used to record sophisticated information about the timing of animal reproductive cycles.
Ben Bacon spent countless hours trying to decode the “proto-writing” system, which is believed to predate other equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.
He approached a team of academics with his theory and they encouraged him to pursue it, despite being “effectively a street person”, he said.
Bacon collaborated with a team, including two professors from Durham University and one from University College London, to publish an article in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Professor Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, said he was “glad to have taken this seriously” when Bacon contacted him. “The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and scores to record information about major ecological events within that calendar,” he said.
Cave paintings of species such as reindeer, fish and now-extinct cattle called aurochs and bison have been found across Europe. Alongside these images, sequences of dots and other marks have been found in more than 600 Ice Age images on cave walls and wearables across Europe. Archaeologists have long believed that these marks had a meaning, but no one has deciphered them.
Bacon set out to decode them, accessing previous research and rock art images at the British Library and looking for recurring patterns, saying it was “surreal” to understand what people were saying a while ago. 20,000 years old.
Using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a point of reference, the team deduced that the number of marks associated with Ice Age animals was a record, by lunar month, of when they mated. . They believe that the inclusion of a “Y” sign, formed by adding one diverging line to another, meant “to give birth”.
Pettitt said: “We are able to show that these people – who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira – also left a record of the early timing that would eventually become commonplace among our species. .”
Since marks are meant to record information numerically rather than record speech, they are not considered “scriptures” in the sense of the pictographic and cuneiform systems that emerged in Sumer from 3400 BC, but are classified as a proto-writing system. . .
Bacon said the work made the people responsible for the designs feel “suddenly much closer”. “As we dig deeper into their world, what we discover is that these ancient ancestors are much more like us than we previously thought,” he said.
The findings encouraged the team to continue researching the meaning of other marks found in the rock drawings.
“What we hope, and the initial work is promising, is that unlocking more parts of the proto-writing system will allow us to better understand the information our ancestors valued,” Bacon said.
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