The oldest calendar ... and it's Lunar

From The Guardian 5th January 2023: 

A primitive writing system used by ice age hunter-gatherers appears to have been uncovered by an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings were a form of lunar calendar. The research suggests cave drawings were not only a form of artistic expression but also used to record sophisticated information about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles. 

Ben Bacon spent countless hours trying to decode the 'proto-writing' system, which is believed to predate other equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years. He approached a team of academics with his theory and they encouraged him to pursue it, despite him being 'effectively a person off the street', he said. Bacon collaborated with a team, including two professors from Durham University and one from University College London, to publish a paper in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Prof Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, said he was 'glad he took it seriously' when Bacon contacted him. '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,' he said. 

Cave paintings of species such as reindeer, fish and now extinct cattle called aurochs and bison have been found across Europe. Alongside these images, sequences of dots and other marks have been found in more than 600 ice age images on cave walls and portable objects across Europe. Archaeologists have long believed these markings had meaning but no one had deciphered them. Bacon set out to decode these, accessing previous research and cave art imagery at the British Library and searching for recurrent patterns, saying that it was 'surreal' to be figuring out what people were saying 20,000 years ago. By using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a reference point, the team deduced that the number of marks associated with ice age animals were a record, by lunar month, of when they were mating. They believe the inclusion of a 'Y' sign, formed by adding a diverging line to another, meant 'giving birth'. Pettitt said: 'We’re able to show that these people – who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira – also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species.' 

Since the marks are thought to be recording information numerically rather than recording speech, they are not considered to be 'writing' in the sense of the pictographic and cuneiform systems that emerged in Sumer from 3,400 BC onwards but are classed as a proto-writing system. Bacon said the work made the people responsible for the drawings feel 'suddenly a lot closer'. 

'As we probe deeper into their world, what we are discovering is that these ancient ancestors are a lot more like us than we had previously thought,' he said. The findings have encouraged the team to carry out further research on the meaning of other markings found in cave drawings. 'What we are hoping, and the initial work is promising, is that unlocking more parts of the proto-writing system will allow us to gain an understanding of what information our ancestors valued,' Bacon said.

Link here.

Another interesting example of art, science and folk tradition coming together in the earliest days of Mankind's development. You can read more on this blog about Lunar calendars here and here.