HERE WE GO AGAIN – ANOTHER CLAIM FOR PALEOLITHIC WRITING:

Aurochs with four dots. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

Periodically, claims spring up that some of the imagery in Paleolithic cave painting in Europe represents early forms of writing, or proto-writing. I have addressed that claim more than once in previous columns, which you can visit by clicking on ‘writing’ in the cloud index at the bottom of this blog.

Another aurochs with four dots. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

A lengthy paper by a team of researchers from England has brought this idea up again in a new context. Their lengthy and complicated analysis has led them to the conclusion that the marks associated with prey animals on cave walls represent records of the fertility cycles of the animals in question, their season of reproduction, etc.

Horse with three marks. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

In 1999, Carol Fritz had looked at Magdalenian art and concluded that the markings that accompany animal portrayals represent an artificial/external memory system for the Upper Paleolithic artists. In other words, they were a record of something. "Fritz assembled a database of 90 Magdalenian portable objects from the Dordogne and the Pyrenees, noting considerable consistency in the 'pricipal types [of sign] including linear marks, dashes, angular signs, arc shapes, broken lines . . . dots, various impact marks and combinations and repetitions thereof' with no site- or region-specific difference. She concluded that these were underpinned by a single conceptual scheme that lacked any significant variation in space or time. There is, therefore, little controversy that the use of sequences of dots, lines and other marks, often associated with animal images, reflected a widespread use of cardinal artificial/external memory systems in Upper Palaeolithic space and time. The actual subject of such systems - the information recorded in them - has been, so far, elusive." (Bacon et al. 2023) This seems reasonable, she is saying that whoever made the marks was recording something, perhaps numbering.

Examples of cave art with "Y" signs. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

 Bacon et al. (2023) addressed those symbols in an attempt to understand what was being recorded. “Our interest is in the sequences of dots/lines associated with the depictions of prey animals in Upper Palaeolithic art, and in the <Y> sign that appears in some of these sequences. As we have noted above, it seems justifiable to assume that such sequences were saying something about the specific taxa with which they were associated, rather than forming a part of the depiction. If they depict blood or breath, for example, why would several taxa including aurochs, fish and a cicada be consistently marked with four dots/lines in various anatomical locations (Aujoulat 2005)?” (Bacon et al. 2023) The authors define these associated marks as meaningful to the animal image they accompany. Their conclusion is that they convey information about the reproductive cycles of the animal; the season of fertility, length of pregnancy, etc., and that the Upper Paleolithic hunters needed to have this information recorded for some reason.

Probable horse with three marks. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

“We believe that we have demonstrated the use of abstract marks to convey meaning about the behavior of the animals with which they are associated, on European Upper Palaeolithic material culture spanning the period from ~37,000 to ~13,000 B.P. In our reading, the animals integral to our analytical modules do not depict a specific individual animal, but all animals of that species, at least as experienced by the images’ creators. This synthesis of image, mathematical syntax (the ordinal/linear sequences) and signs functioning as words formed an efficient means for recording and communicating information that has at its heart the core intellectual achievement of abstraction. The ability to assign abstract signs to phenomena in the world – animals, numbers, parturition, cyclical phases of the moon – and subsequently to use these signs as representations of external reality in a material form that could be used to record past events and predict future events was a profound intellectual achievement.” (Bacon et al. 2023).

Cervid with six red dots. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

This goes somewhat farther than I am comfortable with. I certainly agree that the marks in question could be some form of notation, possibly numbers. And, I can accept the concept that the Upper Paleolithic creators of the imagery understood abstraction. What I have trouble with is the authors’ implication that it is a form of communication that, like writing, someone else in the group who had not been coached in its meaning could see it for the first time and appreciate the meaning its creator was attempting to convey. Additionally, way too much of this study relied on statistical analysis for my comfort. I think that, in the end, it comes down to how you define writing. If writing is using imagery to express something, then these might be defined as writing. If, on the other hand, writing is an agreed upon series of symbols that can be combined to express thoughts, etc., then I find it hard to call these notational examples writing, communication in some fashion yes perhaps, but writing - no. Labeling - perhaps. They did find multiple examples of prey animals with the same numbers of dots or lines. For example, more than one aurochs with four dots, and more than one horse with three markings (although one horse has three dots and another has three lines - different dialects perhaps?) I will give them that, noticing these details are something new.

Quadruped (cervid?) with five dots, also seven lines. Illustration from Bacon et al., 2023.

I am also just a little skeptical about the assumption of their focus on the fertility of their pray animals. I agree that these Upper Paleolithic hunters might be somewhat interested in that subject, but I imagine that they, living by hunting, would have probably taken any chance that came along at harvesting an animal (which was their food after all) so I don’t imagine that those marks and symbols affected their behavior at all, whatever their meaning. Then what would have been the point?

NOTE: Images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below                                                                                

PRIMARY REFERENCE:

Bacon, Bennett, Azadeh Khatiri, James Palmer, Tony Freeth, Paul Pettit and Robert Kentridge, 2023, An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar, 5 January 2023, Cambridge University Press online, Cambridge, England, https://www.cambridge.org. Accessed 5 January 2023.

SECONDARY REFERENCES:

Aujoulat, N., 2005, The Splendour of Lascaux: Rediscovering the greatest treasure of prehistoric art, London, Thames and Hudson.

 Fritz, C., 1999, Towards the reconstruction of Magdalenian artistic techniques: the contribution of microscopic analysis of mobiliary art, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9 (2) 189-208, cited by Bacon et al., 2023.