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

Ancient humans have long made deliberate marks on objects, but some of the earliest groups of Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe around 45,000 years ago took this to a new level. Many of the artefacts 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 contentious.

The use of sequences of symbols is particularly striking. “Having this reoccurring, very systematic use of clearly applied marks distinct from each other, put into sequences – that’s completely something different,” says 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 a Rosetta stone – the slab that helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics – it is almost impossible to know, but crucial insights can be gleaned by analysing how these signs were used.

To investigate this, Dutkiewicz and linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, analysed sequences of signs engraved on a remarkable tranche of artefacts found in caves in the Swabian Jura region of south-west 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 Aurignacian. Among these objects, including flutes, carvings of animals such as mammoths, and figurines of animal-human hybrids, 260 items were engraved more than 3000 times with 22 different symbols. Most frequent is a V-shaped notch, then lines, crosses and dots, with other symbols, such as Y- and star-shaped signs, used less often.

The researchers used computer models to analyse 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 to modern-day 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 not only encoded in the number of different signs you have, but… in how you combine the signs,” says Bentz. For instance, the English alphabet has just 26 letters, but by combining them in patterns, it can encode all the sounds used in spoken language.

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

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

“What this study shows is that the way that the marks are being used on the Aurignacian pieces has a type of configuration that closely matches proto-cuneiform,” says palaeoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger. “They’re showing that there is pattern repetition and organisation.” However, this doesn’t mean that information recorded in these two systems had the same meaning.

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

She and Bentz also examined 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 cannot say,” says Dutkiewicz. “But it’s a firm pattern which tells us there is a deliberate choice of signs that were applied on the media.” What’s more, these choices remained stable throughout the 10,000-year period over which the objects were made, implying that the conventions were handed down over generations. “It’s something that has been carried on over millennia,” she says.

“These were definitely marks being made in specific locations for specific reasons,” says von Petzinger. “Even if we don’t know what the marks meant, we know they had meaning to 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 that is up to 20,000 years old, were a code to record the habits of prey animals.

These studies are showing that, although the first full writing system, cuneiform, emerged around 3200 BC, its roots may go back 40,000 years.