(ORDO NEWS) — The primitive writing system used by hunter-gatherers of the Ice Age was discovered by amateur archaeologist Ben Bacon.
Bacon suggested that the cave paintings left on the walls of caves 20,000 years ago were not just a form of artistic expression for the people of that period, but served as a lunar calendar.
Bacon hypothesized that the drawings were in fact a complex form of recording information about the reproductive cycles of different animals.
With his assumptions, Bacon turned to professional archaeologists for help, who supported the enthusiast.
The scientists created a working group, which included two professors from Durham University and one from University College London.
Archaeologists attracted Bacon to work, who, based on the results of his research, published an article in a specialized scientific journal, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
As Professor Paul Pettit, an archaeologist at Durham University, explained, rock carvings depicting deer, bison and fish have been found all over Europe.
At the same time, along with images of animals, Bacon found a sequence of dots and other signs on more than 600 images of the ice age.
Archaeologists speculated that these signs might also have some meaning, but it was Bacon and his team who figured out how to decipher them.
By looking for repeating patterns and using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a guide, archaeologists have concluded that the number of markings is related to the mating time of the animals in the lunar month.
Since the signs did not record speech, but served to record numerical information, they cannot be considered “writing”, unlike, for example, pictographic and cuneiform systems that appeared in Sumer from 3400 BC.
However, the signs on the walls of the caves are classified by experts as a “protosystem of writing.”
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