Ancient objects discovered in Germany force us to reconsider the origin of writing

Washington. A small object called a “worship figurine” discovered in a cave in Germany in 1979 – made about 40,000 years ago by some of the first people to establish a distinctive culture in Europe – features intriguing sequences of marks and dots. Other objects produced by the same culture exhibit similar markings.

New research suggests that these markings on objects like this figurine, made of mammoth ivory and representing a lion-human hybrid creature, fall short of constituting written language.

However, its sequential use on these artifacts has been found to display properties similar to those of a writing that emerged much later in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3,300 BC, and which was a precursor to cuneiform writing, one of the oldest known forms of written language.

This suggests remarkable cognitive abilities for such an ancient people. The artifacts date from a time when our species was spreading across Europe, crossing the landscape in bands of hunter-gatherers, after leaving Africa and meeting our close relatives, the Neanderthals, along the way.

Researchers use the term “sign types” to describe these marks, which include notches, dots, lines, crosses, star shapes, and a few others.

The experts performed a computational analysis of their use in these artifacts to determine a characteristic called “information density,” a concept that refers to the amount of information transmitted per language unit, such as a syllable or, in this case, a sign.

“We could argue that these sequences of signs go beyond the decoration that was aesthetically pleasing to certain people. That is, our statistical results show that these signs were applied selectively and conventionally,” said linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University in Germany.

Bentz is the lead author of the research published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For example, crosses were found only on tools and animal figurines, but not on human effigies.

The researchers analyzed more than 200 Stone Age artifacts that presented these signs, dated between about 43,000 and 34,000 years ago, from four rock caves in southwestern Germany associated with a culture called Aurignacian.