The origins of writing aren’t set in stone.
The ancient cave peoples weren’t as illiterate as portrayed in popular media. Archaeologists have discovered Paleolithic glyphs in a German cave that could potentially push back the history of written communication by over 30,000 years, per a rock-solid study in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences.
According to the researchers, the symbols were engraved on artifacts that dated back some 40,000 years to the Stone Age, when early humans arrived in Europe from Africa and encountered the Neanderthals.
Despite their age, these ancient etchings boasted a complexity comparable to the early stages of the world’s oldest writing system, cuneiform, which originated around 5,000 years ago, the New Scientist reported.
“The artifacts date back to tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems,” exclaimed study co-author Ewa Dutkiewicz, an archaeologist at Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History, Popular Science reported.
Dutkiewicz and her team had came upon this writing revelation while investigating 260 relics discovered in cave repositories in the Swabian Jura, a mountainous region in Southwest Germany. This archaeological treasure trove included flutes, carvings of animals like mammoths, and figurines of animal-human hybrids.
They were etched with a total of 22 different recurring symbols, including a V-shaped notch and lines, crosses and dots.
Hellbound and Down 