Mysterious Marks on Ice Age Cave Art May Have Been Ancient Records
upstart writes:
The marks might be one of the earliest examples of a coherent notational system:
As far back as roughly 25,000 years ago, Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have jotted down markings to communicate information about the behavior of their prey, a new study finds.
These markings include dots, lines and the symbol "Y," and often accompany images of animals. Over the last 150 years, the mysterious depictions, some dating back nearly 40,000 years, have been found in hundreds of caves across Europe.
Some archaeologists have speculated that the markings might relate to keeping track of time, but the specific purpose has remained elusive (SN: 7/9/19). Now, a statistical analysis, published January 5 in CambridgeArcheological Journal, presents evidence that past people may have been recording the mating and birthing schedule of local fauna.
By comparing the marks to the animals' life cycles, researchers showed that the number of dots or lines in a given image strongly correlates to the month of mating across all the analyzed examples, which included aurochs (an extinct species of wild cattle), bison, horses, mammoth and fish. What's more, the position of the symbol "Y" in a sequence was predictive of birth month, suggesting that "Y" signifies "to give birth."
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