Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing

By 40,000 years ago, Stone Age peoples were using a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the early stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to a study of mysterious signs carved into figurines and other objects found in Germany. If this is confirmed, it would delay the emergence of a proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years.

Ancient humans have long made deliberate marks on objects, but some early groups of Homo sapiens its arrival in Europe around 45,000 years ago took this situation to a new level. Many of the objects 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 controversial.

The use of symbol sequences is particularly striking. “Having this recurring, very systematic use of marks that are clearly applied and distinct from each other, put in sequences, is completely different,” says archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of the Museum of Prehistory and Ancient History in Berlin, Germany.

The big question is: what did these symbols mean, if anything? Without the Rosetta Stone – the slab that helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics – it is almost impossible to know, but crucial information can be gained by analyzing how these signs were used.

To investigate this, Dutkiewicz and linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, analyzed sequences of signs engraved on a remarkable slice of objects found in caves in the Swabian Jura region of southwest Germany, made between 43,000 and 34,000 years ago by some of the earliest H. sapiens groups arrive in Europe – an era known as the Aurignacian. Among these objects, which include flutes, sculptures of animals such as mammoths and animal-human hybrid figurines, 260 objects have been engraved more than 3,000 times with 22 different symbols. The most common are a V-shaped notch, then lines, crosses and dots, while other symbols, such as Y-shaped and star signs, are used less often.

The researchers used computer models to analyze the complexity and information density of the sequences. They compared the designs to those of the earliest known form of proto-writing – proto-cuneiform, found on clay tablets made in Mesopotamia between 3,500 and 3,350 BC – as well as modern writing. The goal was to see what Stone Age sign systems had in common with later systems used to record information.

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

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

This implies that the sooner H. sapiens in Europe, who were hunter-gatherers, had developed a system of symbols to record some of their thoughts. This meets a definition of writing: it is a system allowing human communication through a convention of visible marks.

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

We know that cuneiform was originally an accounting system for recording, for example, harvest quantities, but what about the significance of Stone Age “writing”? There is some evidence to suggest that some of the markings used on Aurignacian objects may be some kind of calendar. For example, a depiction of a human-lion known as the Adorant, carved on a mammoth ivory slab, is decorated with dots and notches arranged in rows of 13 or 12, which may be “calendar observations,” Dutkiewicz explains. “It makes sense that these people would want to keep track of time.”

She and Bentz also examined whether different signs were used on different types of objects and discovered striking usage patterns. Crosses, although one of the most common signs, were never used on objects depicting humans, but were common on those featuring carvings of animals, particularly horses and mammoths, as well as on tools. However, points were never used on tools.

“What that means, we can’t say,” Dutkiewicz says. “But it is a solid trend that tells us that there is a deliberate choice of signs that have been applied to the media.” Furthermore, these choices remained stable throughout the 10,000 year period in which the objects were made, implying that the conventions were passed down through generations. “It’s something that’s been going on for millennia,” she says.

“These were undoubtedly marks made in specific places for specific reasons,” says von Petzinger. “Even though we don’t know what these marks mean, we do know that they had meaning to those who made them.”

This study builds on work done in 2023 by other researchers, who argued that sequences of dots, lines and the symbol Y, painted alongside images of animals in 20,000-year-old rock art, were a code for recording prey habits.

These studies show that although the first complete writing system, cuneiform, appeared around 3,200 BC, its roots could go back 40,000 years.