For decades, researchers suspected that the randomly appearing dots and lines in cave paintings in Europe contained hidden meaning, but were unable to decipher them.
Now, thanks to the work of a pioneering amateur, the code has been cracked, and archaeologists believe a wave of discovery will unfold.
The first major discovery was that ancient humans used pictures to track the mating and birth seasons of wild animals such as cattle, horses, and mammoths.
This suggests that Ice Age hunter-gatherers had an insight into the past, present, and future, as well as devising a form of “proto-writing.”
Deciphering the signs puts the date of the earliest known proto-writing back 14,000 years, at least 20,000 years ago.
Scholars have said that they argue that writing is not a sudden invention required by management and bureaucracy in sophisticated societies, but rather something “much more deeply rooted in human behavior.”
Ben Bacon, the archeology enthusiast behind the revelations, has spent years studying the spots and a distinctive Y symbol found in famous cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamir and more than 600 other places.
When he finally doubted that he knew the answer, Mr. Bacon enlisted the help of several academics who confirmed and validated his findings.
“The fact that amateurs can still play such a critical role in understanding archeology in any era is truly a validation. “It’s a lesson for us all academics,” Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University who helped Mr Brown, told The Telegraph.
To crack the code, Mr. Bacon first enlisted the help of Tony Freeth, professor emeritus at University College London, who had previously led research that led to the deciphering of the function of the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical clock.
“Lunar calendars are tricky because there are twelve and a half lunar months in a year, so they don’t quite fit into a year. As a result, our own modern calendar has almost completely lost all connection to actual lunar months,” said Prof Freeth.
The two men had to reconstruct a calendar based on meteorology and other information paleolithic people might have, which later helped explain the universality of cave symbols.
The duo were then able to use the birth cycles of equivalent animals still alive today to understand that the dot sequence that accompanies many animal drawings is a record of the lunar months in which they mate.
For example, paintings of aurochs, the wild ancestors of modern cattle in Spain, had four dots on them. This indicated that they were mating four months after the “bonne saison” or Paleolithic spring.
Also from Durham, Prof.
By showing that the dots are more than a simple tally of hunting deaths, for example, the research reveals a much higher level of thinking among hunter-gatherers, Professor Pettit said.
“Something fundamentally different [to a tally]if it says that this animal species will mate in four lunar cycles after our agreed starting point… It’s not just record keeping, it’s a real conceptualization of time,” he said.
He hoped that Paleolithic humans would change public perception and show that they were not simply cavemen.
Prof Pettit added that this is also just the beginning. A number of studies are expected to result from the breakthrough. Prof Pettit said they are very close to publishing the findings regarding another symbol related to humans and that more research will be done.