Jan. 5 () –
The meaning of markings seen in drawings in ancient inhabited caves has been deciphered as eearly writing clairvoyance dating to at least 14,000 years earlier than previously thought.
A new study reveals that Ice Age hunter-gatherers They used markings like lines and dots, combined with drawings of their animal prey to record and share sophisticated information about the behavior of these animals, at least 20,000 years ago.
Until now, archaeologists knew that these sequences of lines, dots and other markings, found on cave walls and portable objects from the last Ice Age, stored some kind of information, but they were unaware of their specific meaning.
Using today’s equivalent animal birth cycles as a reference point, the team was able to determine that the number of markings associated with the Ice Age animals was a record, by lunar month, of when they mated.
The team was also able to determine that a ‘Y’ sign in the markings, formed by adding one diverging line to another, meant ‘giving birth’.
His work shows that these sequences record mating and calving seasons and found a statistically significant correlation between the number of marks, the position of the ‘Y’ sign, and the months in which modern animals mate and give birth, respectively.
Since the marks found in more than 600 images on cave walls and portable objects throughout Europerecord information numerically and refer to a calendar instead of recording speech, cannot be called “writing” in the pictographic sense and cuneiform, or wedge-shaped early writing systems that arose in Sumer from 3400 BCE. C. onwards.
However, the team refers to them as a protowriting system, it predates other token-based systems that are believed to have emerged during the Near Eastern Neolithic by at least 10,000 years.
The study, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, was led by an independent researcher, Ben Bacon, and involved a small team including Durham University professors Paul Pettitt (Department of Archaeology) and Robert Kentridge (Department of Psychology). .
Professors Pettitt and Kentridge have worked together to develop the field of visual paleopsychology, the scientific research in psychology that underpins the earliest development of human visual culture, and have used their collaborative skills to analyze the team’s data, reports Durham University in a statement.
The study not only decodes information first recorded thousands of years ago, but also shows that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about the main ecological events within that calendar.
Having shown that they can decipher the meaning of at least some of these symbols, the team hopes to continue their work and try to understand more symbols, their cognitive underpinnings, and what information Ice Age hunter-gatherers valued.
