Archaeologists May Have Discovered the Oldest Form of Writing—Ever

4 min read

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Early hunter-gatherers who lived in the caves of Paleolithic Europe are now thought to have developed something similar to a writing system.
• The symbols do not have all the features of a written language, but they may have been intended to convey information about the migrations and breeding seasons of the animals that people hunted.
• While we may never know what the symbols actually mean, they demonstrate that Paleolithic people were more intelligent than their “caveman” stereotype suggests.

When was the dawn of writing? Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia seem to answer that question in the sense that symbols represent sounds, transcribing a language morpho-phonetically—but writing didn't just appear in the Fertile Crescent out of nowhere thousands of years ago. The cuneiform that would eventually give rise to other written languages took time to evolve. It’s therefore likely that other, older forms of writing once existed.

Now, scientists have found evidence that around 40,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers in what is now Germany developed a proto-writing system that involved scratching symbols onto small objects made of bone, antler, and ivory. Humans had already been carving images into cave walls and portable objects for hundreds of thousands of years by then. What made the symbols on the figurines unique was that they were surprisingly complex, at the level of the first protocuneiform that later appeared in Mesopotamia. Though it is unknown whether the symbols corresponded to sounds, they were intentional and conventional, showing that they were probably incorporated into a language that’s long since been lost to time.

Archaeologists Eva Dutkiewicz, a curator at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, and Christian Bentz of Saarland University, also in Germany, studied 260 Paleolithic artifacts unearthed from caves in the Swabian Alps. Objects with similar markings have been discovered previously on tools and sculptures dating from roughly the same time, when the first modern humans are believed to have migrated from Africa to the European continent. Using specialized computer programs, Bentz and Dutkiewicz analyzed some 3,000 geometric signs that made up the writing system, which consists of dots, notches, crosses, and lines carved into small sculptures of human and animal forms.

“Our analyses hence suggest that the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Central Europe more than 40,000 years ago already had the information capacity to create a sign system comparable to protocuneiform in terms of information encoding potential,” they said in a study recently published in PNAS.

The Paleolithic people of the Swabian Aurignacian culture depicted ancient fauna such as mammoths, cave bears, cave lions, steppe bison, and wild horses in their sculptures. The sequences of signs they carefully inscribed into the bone and antler were not the same for all types of sculpture. For example, one figure vaguely resembling a mammoth is covered in dots and crosses, but while human figures also had various markings, crosses were only found on the animal figures. Scientists believe this may be an indication either of hunting tallies or ritual sacrifices. Another bone fragment with rows of notches on the back reveals a humanoid figure when turned over. The human figure is surrounded by lines and dots, but never crosses, although these are commonly found on other types of ornaments and tools.

Dutkiewicz and Bentz compared the Aurignacian finds to early Mesopotamian artifacts. By analyzing the features of these sign sequences with an algorithm and creating models to predict the amount of information being conveyed, they were able to see how different the Aurignacian writing was from both Mesopotamian protocuneiform and modern writing. The comparison showed that the Aurignacian language's level of complexity was closest to that of Mesopotamian clay tablets from the very early period known as Uruk V (c. 3500 B.C.E.). Later Mesopotamian tablets showed higher entropy, which in linguistics (as opposed to physics) indicates how much new information each letter or symbol introduces, meaning lower repetition rates. There is typically an increase in entropy as forms of writing grow more advanced.

It is also possible that the writing on the figures and tools was meant to be ornamental, but that doesn’t exclude it as a writing system. From calligraphy to words tattooed on skin, writing is often used for decorative purposes while still retaining its information. It’s possible that the writing on the ancient figures served a practical purpose, too. For example, the symbols on the animal figures may have been a record of migrations and breeding seasons of species that were hunted by people from the Aurignacian culture. But the exact meaning of what was written on their artifacts still eludes translation, and whether the writing’s purpose was the same as that of protocuneiform is naturally also unknown.

“It remains hard—or impossible—to prove that Aurignacian sign systems served the same [functions] as protocuneiform,” the archaeologists said. “Protocuneiform developed into a full-blown writing system representing the Sumerian language within the subsequent 1,000 years. The sign sequences of the Swabian Aurignacian, on the other hand, were stable in terms of information density—for 10,000 y—and then disappear.”