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Stone Age people living in Europe 20,000 years ago may have devised a simple form of writing to record the habits of the animals they hunted, according to a study of mysterious symbols on artefacts and cave walls. If confirmed, this would push back the earliest known appearance of a proto-writing system by at least 10,000 years.

At least 400 caves in Europe, such as Lascaux and Chauvet in France and Altamira in Spain, have art on the walls drawn by Homo sapiens groups from around 42,000 years ago onwards. As well as drawings of bison, deer and horses, there are many graphic symbols, such as lines, crosses, dots and asterisks, whose meanings have long been debated.

One common motif is a picture of an animal with a series of lines and dots on or next to it, and such symbols are also found on numerous portable objects, such as carved bones.

Ben Bacon, an independent researcher based in London with an interest in early writing, decided to investigate these images. He compiled a database of animal images and their associated graphic symbols that had been depicted on cave walls or on portable artefacts between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago 鈥� the period when the majority of these motifs were created 鈥� and looked for patterns in the data, first on spreadsheets, then using statistical tools. 鈥淚f you can find patterns, then you can start to work on the meaning,鈥� he says.

Bacon noticed that certain patterns were particularly common. He found 606 depictions of animals together with a sequence of dots or lines. Horses, for example, typically had three marks, whereas mammoths had five. He also found 256 instances of these marks alongside a 鈥淵鈥� symbol, which was typically in the second position of the sequence.

To work out what these patterns might mean, he enlisted a team including archaeologist at Durham University, UK, and Tony Freeth at University College London, who discovered key functions of the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism as an astronomical calculator.

One avenue they investigated was how the patterns of symbols matched data on the reproductive habits of the species depicted 鈥� which included deer, wild cattle called aurochs, mammoths and horses 鈥� such as the month when they mated and gave birth.

Hunting calendar

The analysis indicates that the marks were a lunar calendar that began at the start of spring, with each line or dot denoting a month. The number of marks in a sequence shows how many months after the beginning of spring a particular animal鈥檚 mating season began, while the position of the Y mark denotes the month when they gave birth.

鈥淭his is exactly the sort of thing I鈥檇 expect Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to record,鈥� says Pettitt. 鈥淚f anything was worth recording outside of memory, it would be animals, particularly the times of the year when those prey animals, critical for survival, would be aggregated together and preoccupied with mating and birthing. It makes absolute sense.鈥�

This calendar system seems to have been remarkably stable, in use for a period of at least 10,000 years and in different geographical regions, such as what is now Spain, France and central Europe, enabling the transmission of information over multiple generations.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a very interesting theory,鈥� says palaeoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger. The next step would be to test this idea on a bigger database of symbol sequences, she says.

at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs thinks this study is a step in the right direction, but isn鈥檛 convinced that the graphic signs are a calendar. It is harder than you might think to distinguish what exactly constitutes a Y sign or a line in cave art that is tens of thousands of years old, she says. 鈥淚 find the definition of what constitutes one of these repeated symbols a bit problematic.鈥�

However, if this calendar system is confirmed by further analysis, it means we may need to rethink our understanding of the origins of writing. The first full writing system, cuneiform, appeared around 3500 BC, and it was preceded by proto-writing that has roots going back to clay counting tokens that appeared around 10,000 years ago.

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