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MAN SOLVES CAVE DRAWING MYSTERY FROM OVER 20 000 YEARS AGO

Published: 2025-12-14 19:23:36 Last Updated: 2025-12-15 12:19:12

Neanderthals, our now-extinct cousins, and early humans both had a rich artistic past. Over thousands of years, abstract patterns and handprints gave way to recognisable drawings of flora and animals in ancient cave art. France and Spain are home to many of the oldest cave paintings. Archaeologists can learn a lot about late Ice Age life from these images, especially regarding early people's hunting practices. But for decades, researchers have been perplexed by several recurring dots and lines in animal cave drawings. These symbols are actually a proto-writing system and calendar that chronicles each animal's reproductive cycle, according to recent research published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, thanks to the astute conclusions of a London furniture restorer.
The "random" lines and dots in cave paintings have long been a mystery. Fish, reindeer, cattle, and other animals that were painted in ocher on cave walls around 20,000 years ago have these marks. The significance of the drawings for early humans' information exchange has long been acknowledged by archaeologists. Professor Brian Fagan told History.com in 2021, "When wildlife biologists look at those paintings of reindeer and bison, they can tell you what time of year it was painted just from the appearance of the animals' hides and skins." "By our standards, the way these people understood their surroundings was simply astounding."
Ben Bacon, a furniture restorer rather than a trained archaeologist, set out to solve the puzzle of the dots and lines. He gathered information from pictures of cave paintings found at the British Library and on the internet. He claims to have "amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns." He was especially interested in a Y-shaped symbol that appeared to represent the idea of "giving birth," with a tiny line emerging from the main dash. Bacon concluded that the markings were a reference to a lunar calendar after conducting more investigation.

He presented his theory to scholars at University College London and Durham University. Fortunately, his amateur conclusions were taken seriously. The birth cycles of comparable contemporary animals, such as cows, were matched to the markings. This study revealed that the Palaeolithic marks, which are expressed in lunar months, most likely relate to each creature's mating season. "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," says Paul Pettitt, a professor at Durham University. Although unexpected, evidence supports the long-held belief among scholars that cave drawings played a crucial role in survival. It is an amazing illustration of a proto-writing system with a very understandable function.

"In turn, we're able to show that these people, who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux [in France] and Altamira [in Spain], also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species," says Professor Pettitt. Ancient humans are "a lot more like us than we had previously thought," according to Bacon, who co-wrote the study with the formal scholars. Despite being thousands of years apart, these folks are now much closer to us.

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