Amateur Archaeologist’s Discovery in 20,000-Year-Old Cave Paintings Suggests Math Isn’t Just a Human Trait

His research suggests that cave art throughout Europe may contain a previously undeciphered primitive writing system used by ancient hunter-gatherers living on the continent during the last ice age.

Working alongside Durham University and University College London professors, Ben Bacon found evidence to suggest that cave art markings dating back over 20,000 years may represent an ancient lunar calendar.

Between the depictions of animals, enigmatic abstract markings and geometric signs often appear alongside them. However, researchers needed clarification on what these markings meant.

Created by some ancient homo-sapiens on the continent, the artwork consists of figures and animals, which are sometimes accompanied by signs that have yet to be deciphered. Frequent designs include vertical lines, dots, and Y-shaped slashes, many of which appear in groups.

Despite being studied extensively, researchers have struggled to develop a meaning behind the strange symbols, as no one was able to decode the peculiar signs successfully.

According to the amateur archaeologist who has extensively studied many frescos, including examples in Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux, France, the depictions may go beyond artistic expression and may actually be a primitive form of writing.

According to Bacon’s initial theory, the dots, lines, and Y-shaped slashes may represent a writing system used to measure time, which was quite possibly related to animal reproductive cycles, per The Guardian.

Upon closer inspection, he found that the markings correspond to specific numbers, recorded by rows of dots or lines.

They pulled many examples from databases at local libraries, the university library, and sources Bacon contacted.

He was encouraged by the professors to pursue the theory despite feeling like “a person off the street.”

Regarding his decision to join the project, Professor Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, said he was “glad he took it seriously.”

“The results show that ice age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar,” he said.

This allowed them to theorize that the symbols associated with animal species present in Europe during the ice age were a record of their mating behavior. According to their study, the mysterious “Y” symbol meant “giving birth.”

“We’re able to show that these people – who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira – also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species,” he said.

In this sense, it is not considered a traditional form of “writing” that evolved in Mesopotamia around 3,500 BCE. Instead, it has been classified as a proto-writing system.

Kentridge added: “The implications are that Ice Age hunter-gatherers didn’t simply live in their present, but recorded memories of the time when past events had occurred and used these to anticipate when similar events would occur in the future, an ability that memory researchers call mental time-travel.”

Bacon says that the hunter-gatherers did not need numbers as we currently do, so the “only logical reason that they would exist would be to track time,” he said to NPR.

But Bacon and Pettitt were able to look at how the system correlates with the animals painted with the markings.

Bacon continued: “They need to know what month the reindeer migrates. And once you use these months units, this whole system responds very, very well to that.”

Bacon continues: “And other people would concentrate on the fish and the color of the fish and the form of the fish and all the rest of it. And we just said, no. It’s a fish, and it’s a three. The third is the importance of it. So if you start focusing on the number, it becomes a lot easier to do.”

Bacon also suggests that tracking the animals throughout the spring, summer, and fall makes the brutal winters more bearable.

New evidence is proving that primitive humans were much more clever than we once believed, despite their culture being far simpler than that of modern-day humans.

“We think there’s a difference between us and them. And we’re saying we cannot distinguish the difference between us intellectually or cognitively. We are the same as they are,” Bacon said.

He added, “What we are hoping, and the initial work is promising, is that unlocking more parts of the proto-writing system will allow us to gain an understanding of what information our ancestors valued.”

We still share similarities with Neanderthals, who were able to build homes, create rituals, and use a language to communicate with each other.

“Using information and imagery of cave art available via the British Library and on the internet, I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeat patterns,” Bacon said.

For many years, skeletal remains revealed that our ancestors became “anatomically modern” but scientists couldn’t find evidence of when humans became “behaviorally modern.”

A study, which was published in “Science” in 2018 showed that the Neanderthals were able to create cave art.

There are also some clues that Neanderthals in Europe also accessorized around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago.

But it seems that Neanderthals, who were still around at the time, we able to create sophisticated examples of identity and communication.

The art shows that people created cave art at all sites at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Western Europe.

While no one knew the exact meaning of the paintings, Bacon depicted that many Neanderthals were creating a calendar to track animals and time.

If one group reported how they were tracking the life cycle of an animal, another group could record the information and pass it along to help other Neanderthals survive the winter.

Hypothesis on the cause of the Neanderthal demises suggests that groups did not communicate with each other, and violence broke out between them. Other hypotheses suggest that modern humans were a competitive replacement for them.

Neanderthals had the capacity for symbolic behavior, much like modern humans residing around the world.