Stone Age symbols may date back to the earliest form of writing

Stone Age humans 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 signs engraved on figurines and other objects found in Germany. If confirmed, this pushes back the emergence of a proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years.

Ancient people have long made conscious marks on objects, but some of the earliest groups of Homo sapiens arriving in Europe around 45,000 years ago took this 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 disputed.

Particularly striking is the use of symbol sequences. “To have this recurring, very systematic use of distinctly applied marks that are different from each other, inserted into sequences – that’s something completely different,” says archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, Germany.

The big question is, what, if anything, did these symbols mean? Without a Rosetta Stone—the tablet that helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs—it’s almost impossible to know, but crucial insights can be gleaned from analyzing how these signs were used.

To investigate this, Dutkiewicz and linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, analyzed sequences of signs engraved on a remarkable proportion of objects found in caves in the Swabian Jura region of southwestern Germany, made between 43,000 and 34,000 years ago by some of the earliest. H. sapiens groups to arrive in Europe – an era known as the Aurignacians. Among these objects, including flutes, carvings of animals such as mammoths, and figurines of animal-human hybrids, 260 objects were engraved more than 3,000 times with 22 different symbols. Most often, a V-shaped notch is used, then lines, crosses and dots, with other symbols, such as Y and star signs, used less often.

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 with modern writing. The aim was to see what the Stone Age sign systems had in common with later systems used to record information.

“It makes sense to look at sequences, because information is encoded not only 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 in patterns it can encode all the sounds used in spoken language.

The analysis found that Aurignacian character sequences were clearly distinguishable from modern writing. 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.

This means that the earliest H. sapiens in Europe, who were hunter-gatherers, had developed a symbol system to record some of their thoughts. This fulfills one definition of writing: that it is a system that enables human communication through a convention of visible marks.

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

We know that cuneiform writing originated as an accounting system to record, for example, quantities of crops, but what about the significance of Stone Age “writing”? There are hints that some of the marks used on the 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 keep track of time.”

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

“Whatever this means, we can’t say,” says Dutkiewicz. “But there is a fixed pattern that tells us that there is a deliberate choice of characters that were used on the media.” Moreover, these choices remained stable throughout the 10,000-year period over which the objects were made, suggesting that the conventions were handed down over generations. “It’s something that’s been passed down over millennia,” she says.

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

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

These studies show that although the first full writing system, cuneiform, appeared around 3200 BC, its roots can go back 40,000 years.