Overview
- Researchers digitized more than 3,000 geometric signs on roughly 260 Aurignacian artifacts from caves in Germany’s Swabian Jura, dated to about 34,000–45,000 years ago.
- Information-theoretic measures such as entropy, repetition, and predictability revealed sequences that differ from modern writing yet closely match the earliest proto-cuneiform statistically.
- Sign use followed consistent conventions by object type—crosses on animal figurines and tools but never on human figures, and dots absent on tools—that persisted for roughly 10,000 years.
- The system’s specific meanings remain undeciphered, and the authors stress it is not writing that represents spoken language, with hypotheses ranging from notational tallies to calendric tracking still unproven.
- The work, published February 23 in PNAS and conducted under the ERC-backed EVINE project, will expand as additional artifacts are cataloged to refine comparisons and interpretations.