By Jacopo Prisco, CNN
(CNN) — Symbols and markings carved into tools and figurines by Stone Age humans over 40,000 years ago could be an ancient precursor to writing, according to a new analysis.
The marks, found on 260 artifacts from Germany, are very different from modern writing systems, but show the same level of complexity and density of information as proto-cuneiform script, which arose in Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq, about 5,300 years ago. The script used abstract pictographic symbols and soon developed into cuneiform, which scholars consider the first known writing system.
“They are very similar, in fact, indistinguishable from the earliest proto-cuneiform,” said Christian Bentz, an associate professor at Saarland University in Germany and coauthor of a study on the Stone Age carvings, which published Monday in the journal PNAS. “This was really surprising to us, because we would have expected these sign sequences to not be close to either proto-writing or modern-day writing.”
The researchers used computer-assisted methods to analyze about 3,000 geometric signs, including crosses, dots, notches and lines. Carved into objects made of ivory, bone and antler, the markings often represented animals that were common in the area at the time, such as woolly mammoths, lions, bears and horses. Some of the figurines, which were found to have a higher information density compared with the tools, depicted human-lion hybrids, perhaps as a form of connection to or appreciation for the land’s top predator, according to the study authors.
The objects analyzed in the study come from a relatively small area in the Swabian Alps in southwestern Germany, but they are not the only ones bearing these kinds of markings, which are commonly found on Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age, tools and sculptures dating back between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago. “That’s more or less when anatomically modern humans entered the European continent from Africa and started living there,” said study coauthor Ewa Dutkiewicz, an archaeologist and curator at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin.
“Besides these markings, they had figurative art. They had tools. They had personal ornaments. They had musical instruments,” Dutkiewicz added. “So they were quite modern in their behavior, and now we could say that the foundation of a sign system was also present at that time.”
Uncertain meaning
The signs often occur in patterns — such as line, line, line or cross, cross, cross — which is not common in spoken language, according to the researchers. Some of the artifacts were discovered almost 100 years ago, but ongoing excavations are constantly unearthing new ones. Over the years, scholars have interpreted the markings to mean many different things, including hunting tallies, moon calendars, fur patterns or simply decoration.
“When I first had the result on screen, I could not believe it,” Bentz recalled about the moment he first looked at the computer analysis and saw a match between the older Stone Age markings and proto-cuneiform script found on more modern tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. “I sent a screenshot to my colleague.”
There seems to be a logic to the selection of symbols, according to Bentz. “On animal figurines, like mammoths and horses, but also on tools, we have crosses,” he said, “but we never find crosses on human figurines, so somehow there must have been a kind of taboo or convention to not put crosses onto human figurines.” Other studies have suggested that crosses could signify ritual killings, he added, so perhaps that’s why