Paleolithic signs: I’d love for us to discover a stone age writing system, but this is not it

Writing is one of humanity’s best inventions. Unlike speech, it allows the transmission of ideas over generations with little degradation. You, in the year 2026, can pick up and read a poem written 2,700 years ago. Almost miraculously, you gain access to the mind of its long-dead writer.

As far as we know, writing was invented in Mesopotamia and Egypt a little more than 5,000 years ago. The earliest writing was done on clay tablets using cuneiform.

Is there any evidence of even earlier writing systems? A recent paper by Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz looks at Paleolithic artifacts from 40,000 years ago and concludes that the signs scratched on them have an information content that is comparable to early protocuneiform tablets. They are explicitly not saying that paleolithic signs were a fully developed writing system: The statistical fingerprint is quite different. However, in terms of statistical properties and information content they’re comparable to the earliest protocuneiform tablets.

Paleolithic art makes it clear that the humans creating it were not cognitively inferior to us. I’d be surprised if they didn’t use scratches in wood or bone to count their supplies or to mark the passing of days. This is different from encoding non-numeric information. Looking at the objects and reading Bentz’ and Dutkiewicz’ analysis, I don’t believe that our paleolithic ancestors were trying to encode any type of verbal information with those scratches. In some cases, they probably were count marks. In other cases, they were probably just decoration. As the photos in the paper show, the scratches are typically made on ivory figurines and other decorative objects. They are often arranged in a pleasing way. The protocuneiform tablets shown in the paper for comparison aren’t particularly decorative. As Bentz and Dutkiewicz write, decoration and writing system aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s true, but it doesn’t support the writing system hypothesis either.

I’d love for us to discover a paleolithic writing system, but this is not it.

Here are the videos Bentz made about their work and which I recommend. They show beautiful and interesting paleolithic objects of whose existence I had no idea.

Here‘s Paul Gilster’s post on Centauri Dreams that pointed me to the paper by Bentz and Dutkiewicz. Here‘s an example of something that was created 11,000 years ago but looks like it’s just a few decades old.