40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

We may take it for grant­ed that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems devel­oped with the Sume­ri­ans around 3400 B.C.E. The archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence so far sup­ports the the­o­ry. But it may also be pos­si­ble that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems pre­date 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by sev­er­al thou­sand years. And what’s more, it may be pos­si­ble, sug­gests pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gist Genevieve von Pet­zinger, that those pre­his­toric forms of writ­ing, which include the ear­li­est known hash­tag marks, con­sist­ed of sym­bols near­ly as uni­ver­sal as emo­ji.

The study of sym­bols carved into cave walls all over the world—including pen­ni­forms (feath­er shapes), clav­i­forms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could even­tu­al­ly push us to “aban­don the pow­er­ful nar­ra­tive,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of his­to­ry as total dark­ness until the Sume­ri­ans flip the switch.” Though the sym­bols may nev­er be tru­ly deci­pher­able, their pur­pos­es obscured by thou­sands of years of sep­a­ra­tion in time, they clear­ly show humans “undim­ming the light many mil­len­nia ear­li­er.”

While bur­row­ing deep under­ground to make cave paint­ings of ani­mals, ear­ly humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also devel­oped a sys­tem of signs that is remark­ably con­sis­tent across and between con­ti­nents. Von Pet­zinger spent years cat­a­logu­ing these sym­bols in Europe, vis­it­ing “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Ali­son George, “in France, Span, Italy and Por­tu­gal. The sym­bols she found ranged from dots, lines, tri­an­gles, squares and zigza­gs to more com­plex forms like lad­der shapes, hand sten­cils, some­thing called a tec­ti­form that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feath­er shapes called pen­ni­forms.”

She dis­cov­ered 32 signs found all over the con­ti­nent, carved and paint­ed over a very long peri­od of time. “For tens of thou­sands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ances­tors seem to have been curi­ous­ly con­sis­tent with the sym­bols they used.” Von Pet­zinger sees this sys­tem as a car­ry­over from mod­ern humans’ migra­tion into Europe from Africa. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new inven­tion,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlock­ing the mys­ter­ies of the world’s old­est sym­bols.

In her TED Talk at the top, von Pet­zinger describes this ear­ly sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through abstract signs as a pre­cur­sor to the “glob­al net­work of infor­ma­tion exchange” in the mod­ern world. “We’ve been build­ing on the men­tal achieve­ments of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to for­get that cer­tain abil­i­ties haven’t already exist­ed,” long before the for­mal writ­ten records we rec­og­nize. These sym­bols trav­eled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung togeth­er in an ancient neck­lace.

Von Pet­zinger believes, writes George, that “the sim­ple shapes rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal shift in our ancestor’s men­tal skills,” toward using abstract sym­bols to com­mu­ni­cate. Not every­one agrees with her. As the Brad­shaw Foun­da­tion notes, when it comes to the Euro­pean sym­bols, emi­nent pre­his­to­ri­an Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or near­ly always) asso­ci­at­ed with ani­mal fig­ures and thus can­not be said to be the first steps toward sym­bol­ism.”

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that both the signs and the ani­mals were meant to con­vey ideas just as a writ­ten lan­guage does. So argues MIT lin­guist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper pub­lished in Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy last year. Cave art might show ear­ly humans “con­vert­ing acoustic sounds into draw­ings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. Lesure says her research “sug­gests that the cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms nec­es­sary for the devel­op­ment of cave and rock art are like­ly to be anal­o­gous to those employed in the expres­sion of the sym­bol­ic think­ing required for lan­guage.”

In oth­er words, under her the­o­ry, “cave and rock [art] would rep­re­sent a modal­i­ty of lin­guis­tic expres­sion.” And the sym­bols sur­round­ing that art might rep­re­sent an elab­o­ra­tion on the theme. The very first sys­tem of writ­ing, shared by ear­ly humans all over the world for tens of thou­sands of years.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness