Stone Age symbols may supersede the oldest form of writing

Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to a study of mysterious characters engraved on figurines and other artifacts found in Germany. If confirmed, it would push back the origin of the proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years.

Ancient people had long made intentional marks on objects, but some of the earliest groups Homo sapiens the arrival in Europe about 45,000 years ago took it to a new level. Many of the artifacts they made, such as pendants, tools, and figurines, were engraved with sequences of graphic symbols such as lines, crosses, and dots. These groups also painted symbols on cave walls alongside depictions of animals, and the meaning of these symbols has been disputed.

The use of symbol sequences is particularly striking. “This repeated, very systematic use of clearly applied marks that are different from each other, sequenced – that’s something else entirely,” says the archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, Germany.

The big question is what, if anything, did these symbols mean? Without the Rosetta Stone—the one that helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics—it’s nearly impossible to know, but crucial insights can be gained by analyzing how the characters were used.

To investigate this, Dutkiewicz and the linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, analyzed sequences of characters carved into a remarkable tranche of artifacts found in caves in the Swabian Jura region of southwestern Germany, created between 43,000 and 34,000 years ago by some of the earliest H. sapiens to Europe – an era known as the Aurignacian. Among these objects, including flutes, carvings of animals such as mammoths, and figurines of animal-human hybrids, 260 items were engraved more than 3,000 times with 22 different symbols. The most common is a V-shaped notch, followed by lines, crosses and dots, other symbols such as Y-shaped signs and stars are less frequently used.

The researchers used computer models to analyze the complexity and information density of the sequences. They compared the patterns to those of the earliest known form of proto-writing – proto-cuneiform, found on clay tablets made in Mesopotamia around 3500 to 3350 BC – as well as modern script. The aim was to find out what Stone Age sign systems have in common with later systems used to record information.

“It makes sense to look at sequences because the information is not just encoded in the number of different characters you have, but … in how you combine the characters,” says Bentz. For example, the English alphabet has only 26 letters, but by combining them into patterns, it can encode all the sounds used in spoken language.

The analysis found that the Aurignacian character sequences were clearly distinguishable from the modern script. But to the researchers’ surprise, the statistical properties of the 40,000-year-old character sequences were comparable to those of the earliest proto-cuneiform clay tablets. “The features are very, very similar,” says Bentz.

That means first H. sapiens in Europe who were hunters and gatherers developed a system of symbols to record some of their ideas. This fulfills one definition of writing: that it is a system of enabling human communication through the convention of visible signs.

“This study shows that the way the marks are used on Aurignacian pieces has a type of configuration that closely resembles proto-cuneiform,” says paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger. “They show that there is repetition of patterns and organization.” However, this does not mean that the information recorded in the two systems had the same meaning.

We know that cuneiform writing originated as an accounting system to record, say, the amount of crops, but what about the meanings of Stone Age “writing”? There are indications that some of the marks used on Aurignacian objects may have been a type of calendar. For example, a depiction of a lion-man known as the Adorant, carved on a mammoth ivory plaque, is decorated with dots and notches in rows of 13 or 12, which may be “calendar observations,” Dutkiewicz says. “It makes sense that these people might want to track time.”

She and Bentz also examined whether different characters were used on different types of objects and found striking patterns of use. Crosses, although one of the most common signs, were never used on objects depicting humans, but were common on objects with carvings of animals, especially horses and mammoths, as well as on tools. However, dots were never used on tools.

“Whatever that means, we can’t say,” says Dutkiewicz. “But it’s a solid pattern that tells us there was a deliberate selection of characters that were applied to the media.” What’s more, these choices remained stable throughout the 10,000-year period that the objects were made, meaning that the conventions were passed down from generation to generation. “It’s something that’s been passed down for millennia,” he says.

“They were definitely brands that were made in specific places for specific reasons,” says von Petzinger. “Even if we don’t know what the marks meant, we know they had meaning for the people who made them.”

The study builds on work from 2023 by other researchers who argued that sequences of dots, lines and the Y symbol, painted alongside images of animals in cave art that is up to 20,000 years old, were a code to record prey habits.

These studies show that although the first complete writing system, cuneiform, appeared around 3200 BC, its roots may go back as far as 40,000 years.

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