Stone Age art may reveal 40,000-year-old precursor to writing

Ancient art may hold clues to origins of written language

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

One of the oldest known works of art on the planet is a mammoth figurine carved from ivory by a Stone Age artisan around 40,000 years ago. Found in what is now Germany, it is marked with crosses and dots. The meaning of these marks is a mystery, but a new analysis of the object and hundreds of others found in the same region reveals that these marks may have a meaning specific to their ancient creators.

Researchers analyzed more than 3,000 marks on 260 objects, including the mammoth, discovered in caves in Germany. They determined that the patterns of the markings are as statistically complex as protocuneiform, a form of ancient writing found on tablets from ancient Mesopotamia dated to around 3,500 BCE.

The results, published Monday in PNAScould shed light on why ancient humans created art and what it was used for.

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This type of work can be “difficult,” in part because such ancient inscriptions are virtually impossible to interpret, says Geneviève von Petzinger, a paleoanthropologist and National geographic emerging explorer, who studies the origin of writing and was not involved in the new study. But looking for patterns in symbols, such as intentionality and repetition, “are both excellent approaches to at least try to confirm that these markings had meaning beyond being decorative scribbles.”

The analysis was based on a trove of Stone Age objects, from mammoths to a mysterious lion-human hybrid to lesser-known tools and musical instruments, says Ewa Dutkiewicz, a research associate at the Museum of Prehistory and Ancient History in Berlin. Many items were covered in marks, but the reason remained a mystery. Was it decorations, hunting tallies, or something else?

Dutkiewicz worked with linguist Christian Bentz, an associate professor who studies the history of language at Saarland University in Germany, to digitize the inscriptions on the objects. They compared the characteristics of the markings – sign diversity and repetition, for example – to those of other, more recent sign systems, including modern writing.

The inscriptions do not resemble modern writing. But when Bentz compared the markings to early protocuneiforms, the similarity was unmistakable, Bentz says.

“I couldn’t believe it. I went through the data over and over again,” he says. Stone Age markings and protocuneiforms appear to be equally complex, although they are separated by a few tens of thousands of years and considerable distance.

Of the 260 objects, ivory figurines such as the mammoth bore more information-rich markings than those on tools, the researchers said. Cross-shaped marks do not appear on objects representing humans, while dots do not appear on tools, indicating that the marks must have some sort of symbolic meaning to the Stone Age humans who made them, Bentz says.

“The organization [of the markings] indicates the transmission of more complex ideas,” explains von Petzinger.

Decoding what they meant is an exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, task. But Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s methods could help other researchers analyze what similar markings on other ancient objects from elsewhere in the world might mean, even if they can’t read them.

“The more we learn about the choice of ‘writing’ surfaces and choices regarding specific images and signs, the more we can learn about this period from which [writing] appeared later,” says von Petzinger.

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