Prehistory and Communication: Signs of proto-writing have been discovered in Paleolithic caves

A new study has revealed an ancient system of written communication at sacred prehistoric sites.

By analyzing a total of 800 series of abstract signs found on the walls of several Paleolithic caves, a team of researchers has identified what appears to be an ancient written communication system.

The prehistoric sanctuary of Lascaux in France, which dates back nearly 20,000 years, is one of the places where these signs were discovered.

These banners, along with drawings of animals such as lions, rhinos, buffaloes, and mammoths, considered by Ice Age hunter-gatherers as “animal masters,” would have served to make up a kind of lunar calendar.

This revelation offers a new perspective on the most ancient artistic manifestation of man, which is also the beginning of sacred sense.

A study published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal indicates that these references to a primitive written language are found in about 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira.

Homo sapiens groups in the Upper Paleolithic period traced them starting around 42,000 years ago, and then accompanied them with pictorial images of animals that appeared about 5,000 years later.

Experts Paul Pettitt and Robert Kentridge of Durham University, along with Tony Fritt of University College London and Bennett Bacon, suggest that the dashbal is one of the three signs used.

In conclusion, this discovery provides an extraordinary foretaste of what, many thousands of years later, would become the writing on clay tablets of agricultural Mesopotamia.

These ancient signs allow us to read the first written communication born in the European Upper Paleolithic, the first known writing (or proto-writing) in the history of Homo sapiens.

source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

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