Amateur archaeologist uncovers ice age ‘writing’ system.

A primitive writing system used by ice age hunter-gatherers appears to have been uncovered by an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings were a form of lunar calendar.

The research suggests cave drawings were not only a form of artistic expression but also used to record sophisticated information about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.

Ben Bacon spent countless hours trying to decode the “proto-writing” system, which is believed to predate other equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.

Bacon collaborated with a team, including two professors from Durham University and one from University College London, to publish a paper in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Bacon set out to decode these, accessing previous research and cave art imagery at the British Library and searching for recurrent patterns, saying that it was “surreal” to be figuring out what people were saying 20,000 years ago.

Since the marks are thought to be recording information numerically rather than recording speech, they are not considered to be “writing” in the sense of the pictographic and cuneiform systems that emerged in Sumer from 3,400 BC onwards but are classed as a proto-writing system.

Source: www.theguardian.com

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