25/02/2026
But an important question remains: to what extent was this symbolic system actually disseminated?
These markings emerged in small, decentralized Ice Age communities—long before agriculture, social hierarchy, or occupational specialization. Without dense populations or institutional structures, it’s possible these symbols functioned locally or culturally rather than as a standardized, widely transmitted system of communication.
This may help explain why such early symbolic traditions did not evolve into complex administrative or legal writing systems like the Code of Hammurabi seen in later river valley civilizations. Writing, as we typically understand it, may require not just symbols—but the social complexity to sustain, standardize, and expand them.
Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to a study of mysterious signs engraved on figurines and other artefacts found in Germany. If confirmed, this pushes back the emergence of a proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years.
Ancient humans have long made deliberate marks on objects, but some of the earliest groups of Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe around 45,000 years ago took this to a new level. Many of the artefacts they made, such as pendants, tools and figurines, were engraved with sequences of graphic symbols such as lines, crosses and dots. These groups also painted symbols on cave walls alongside depictions of animals, and the meaning of these symbols has been contentious.
The use of sequences of symbols is particularly striking. “Having this reoccurring, very systematic use of clearly applied marks distinct from each other, put into sequences – that’s completely something different,” says archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, Germany.
Read more here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516606-stone-age-symbols-may-push-back-the-earliest-form-of-writing/
Image: Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0
