London amateur archaeologist solves Ice Age mystery

Dashes, dots and Y-shaped marks on animal murals made by hunter-gatherers over 20,000 years ago: archaeologists knew they had to mean something, but what?

Ben Bacon, a cabinet maker and amateur archaeologist from London, asked himself the same question and became fascinated by the images of our ancestors during the Weichselian, the last ice age. He studied the hundreds of images of cattle and fish drawn thousands of years ago in the caves of Lascaux (France) and Altamira (Spain), among other places, in the hope of discovering a pattern.

The Briton eventually came up with the idea of ​​looking at the designations based on the lunar calendar and the birth cycles of similar modern animals. This led to a peculiar discovery: the signs seemed to be related to the mating season of the animals depicted. According to Bacon, the Y sign that can be seen on some drawings was a way of indicating birth: after all, two lines converge into a single line.

Bacon approached academics with his theory and decided to work with a team of researchers from two universities. They published their findings yesterday in the reference magazine Cambridge Archaeological Journal. The conclusion: Bacon was right with his theory. The team showed a statistically significant correlation between the number of marks, the location of the Y mark, and the months in which the animals mate and give birth.

According to researchers, it is a precursor to human writing, or proto-writing. The deciphered characters date back more than 10,000 years to the oldest known proto-script, which dates from the Neolithic era in the historic Near East.

Paul Pettitt, researcher at Durham University, says against the BBC that he’s glad he took Bacon seriously when he approached him. “The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar with markers to indicate major ecological events.”

“The meaning of designations in drawings has always intrigued me,” Bacon told the BBC. “So I tried to decipher it using a method that others have used to understand ancient Greek writings.”

Bacon calls it “surreal” that he understood what the hunter-gatherers meant with the images. “Our ancestors were much more like us than we previously thought. These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly much closer.”