Lines, notches, dots or crosses: around 40,000 years ago, people in the Swabian Alb and elsewhere in Europe carved mysterious series of characters into tools and sculptures. Now statistical analyzes of these Stone Age patterns show that they contain a surprisingly high density of information – comparable to similar dots and notches on proto-kuneiform clay tablets from Mesopotamia. The Stone Age signs could therefore have been more than just decoration.
Numerous Paleolithic artifacts decorated with mysterious strings have been discovered in caves in the Swabian Alb, including tools and figurines 34,000 to 45,000 years old. These include a small mammoth made of mammoth ivory with rows of crosses and dots from the Vogelherd Cave in the Lone Valley, but also the relief of a hybrid creature consisting of a lion and a human from the Geißenklösterle Cave. Even rows of dots and notches can also be seen on this “adorant”. “The Swabian Alb is one of the world’s most important discovery regions, but there are many other sites. Numerous tools and sculptures from the Paleolithic bear deliberately placed symbol sequences,” explains first author Ewa Dutkiewicz from the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin.
Stone Age symbols with information content
To find out more about the purpose of these Stone Age signs, Dutkiewicz and linguist Christian Bentz from Saarland University examined more than 3,000 such Stone Age signs on 260 objects. They used computer analysis to look for statistical patterns in the character strings and compare them with those of other simple character systems. “With our evaluations, we can initially prove that the character sequences have nothing in common with our current writing, which depicts spoken languages and has a high information density,” reports Bentz. “On the archaeological finds, on the other hand, we have signs that are repeated very often. Spoken languages do not have these repetitive structures.”
Nevertheless, the Stone Age signs also have information content, as the team found: “Our results also show that the hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period developed a sign system with a statistically comparable information density to that of the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia,” reports Bentz. This early form of cuneiform writing, consisting of dots and notches, was created more than 5,000 years ago – almost 40,000 years later than the Stone Age character sequences from the Swabian Alb. Nevertheless, the character sequences are comparable in terms of their complexity and information density.
Similar to proto-cuneiform
This result also surprised the two researchers. “We would have suspected that the early proto-cuneiform was much closer to today’s writing systems – simply because of the relative temporal proximity,” says Dutkiewicz. “However, the more we looked into it, the more clear it became how structurally similar the early proto-cuneiform script is to the much older Paleolithic character sequences.” From the Paleolithic period to the first proto-cuneiform script, little changed. “After that, around 5,000 years ago, a new system emerged relatively suddenly that reproduces spoken language – of course we find completely different statistical properties,” explains Bentz.
However, it is still unknown what information the Stone Age people recorded through their signs. “But the new findings could help narrow down possible interpretations,” says Dutkiewicz. In her opinion, there is evidence to suggest that these symbols were specifically placed on certain artifacts. Anatomically and cognitively, people in the Paleolithic era were probably as advanced as we are. Capturing and passing on information and knowledge was also extremely important for them in order to survive or to coordinate a group. Bentz and Dutkiewicz are already looking for such strings elsewhere in Europe. “So far we have only scratched the surface of what character sequences can be found on a wide variety of artifacts,” says the archaeologist.
Source: Saarland University; Specialist article: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2520385123