The “40,000-year-old writing” headline is a bit ahead of the evidence. What researchers have actually found is that Ice Age caves are full of recurring abstract marks — dots, lines, Y-shapes, grids — that show up across sites and cultures. That’s fascinating on its own, because it suggests early humans were tracking things and passing on symbolic systems.
A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.
So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language.
I have had the privilege of touring some of the French caves with these paintings, and it is a profoundly moving experience to face a wall of hand stencils that is tens of thousands of years old. From the sizes of the hands, it seems clear that a community had made them, both little children and grown adults. The marks are so incredibly old, and yet it’s easy to visualize the people holding up their hands and blowing ocher on them, leaving a shadow behind. I don’t know if it’s possible to still visit these caves today —- we were on a National Geographic tour led by paleoanthropologist Don Johanson, discoverer of “Lucy”, and he has long since retired —- but it’s well worth your time if you ever get a chance to see them.
I just hope they don’t do what they do in Italy and freshen them up by painting over them
Don't leave out the Americans on that one, especially if there's money to be made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_(Leonardo)
Thank you for this link. This whole over painting thing, it just, I felt like im the only person on the planet shocked by it. The second I arrive in italy I was told yes thats the painting of the last supper. And I was like wtf, it looks freshly painted. I read a placque which said somethign like ( due to the poor damp conditions of the room) the painting needed constant restoration.
I was like wtf so basically non of this shit is original?
Noone else seemed to even consider this.
Im sure poepl ein the art world come to terms with it, but I dont think anyone outside the field even conceives of what a restoration normally is
Not sure why I got a downvote, maybe there are people who aren't aware of how paintings are restored.
It's not possible to visit the caves for most people. They do have reconstructions of the more famous ones though (Lascaux, Crosquer, ...)
Actually, the notion these are entoptics suggests they are the roots of syntax.
Pretty sure the original claim was not that it was language, just a tally system rather than some undeciphered artistic meaning.
Isn't communicating symbolic thought through drawn symbols that are understood by multiple people the definition of writing?
No. Linguists make a distinction between "writing" and "proto-writing". Generally speaking, proto-writing involves using abstract symbols for some particular use case, historically it was common for accounting. You draw a sheep and put five tally marks next to it to indicate you have five sheep, that kind of thing. Proto-writing is considerably older than true writing, among the earliest widely known examples would be clay tokens known as "bulla" [1] from at least 8000 BCE
Proto-writing can be very complex (I remember reading a book where a linguist calls mathematical notation "proto-writing"), but it's not "true writing" until it's capable of communicating essentially any idea you can express in spoken language (it's hard to write "I miss my cat Whiskers" in mathematical symbols) in at least a partly phonetic way (all true writing languages are phonetic to some extent). The earliest examples of that is Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000 BCE. Whatever this discovery is, it's not true writing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)
Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.
Early Sumerian symbols depicting kinds of goods (wheat, sheep, beer, etc.), and marks next to these to indicate quantities, are classed as proto-writing.
There's also more general use of symbols to represent ideas or groups, like a cross representing Jesus or Christianity, for example, which aren't classed as writing
> Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.
I don't think this is the proper definition, since by this standard, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese ideograms, Norse runes and many others would not be considered writing; and any attempt to notate sign languages would not be writing by definition.
Instead, writing is a direct and consistent correspondence between marks and elements of human language (alphabets and abjads represent speech sounds, various ideographic systems represent semantics, you can have hybrids etc). This still makes sure that tallies or just general symbols or icons are not a form of writing, but it doesn't require any phonetic aspect to it either.
All true written languages are phonetic to some extent, even though they may not be alphabetical the way English is. Chinese characters have phonetic components indicating tone and pronunciation, Egyptian hieroglyphs are largely syllabic, Norse runes are alphabetic like English. In Chinese and Egyptian, there are purely non-phonetic symbols representing ideas (and other things like determinatives), but most have some kind of phonetic meaning (this is my understanding at least).
There's a spectrum of how phonetic a language is, where Finnish is on one end (sounds very closely align with spelling) and Chinese characters on the other, but all written languages are phonetic to some degree.
Yes, I would just add as clarification that from my learning of (Mandarin) Chinese, each character is unambiguously associated with a syllable (including tone), so if you know the syllable corresponding to the character, you should be able to read a sentence exactly (modulo occasional changes to the tones of some syllables to make it flow better). (If we defined "phonetic" to have that meaning then Chinese is actually very phonetic!)
The converse is not the case: Chinese is very homophonic so there are a lot of syllable (sounds) that have many different meanings and hence characters associated with them.
I should explain a little further what I mean: there are "pure" ideograms even in English, like the & and % characters. These unambiguously refer to the words "and" and "percent", but the way they're written gives no clue whatsoever to a reader on how they're pronounced. If you had gone your entire life reading and writing English but somehow never encountered them, the way they're written is entirely unhelpful. Emoji are an even more abstract example, that don't even correspond to any word at all, just usually indicating mood or something like that.
It's a common misconception that all Chinese characters are like that, but my understanding is that while there are many, many more ideograms in Chinese than English, something like 80% of the characters do in some way indicate pronunciation (even if it's just something like tone) or use the "rebus principle" or something like that. So again, it's a spectrum, but all writing systems are phonetic to some extent. Human's wouldn't be able to use it to communicate effectively otherwise.
I will say that I'm not a linguist, nor can I read or write a word of Mandarin Chinese, and will happily stand corrected. This is just what I've picked up from reading books about the history and development of writing.
Norse runes are just an alphabet. As long as your language uses the same set of sounds, you can write with them today.
People get confused about them because there's a tie-in with the old Germanic religions where they're used by the gods for divination, and the neopagans have adopted them for that purpose. But they're really just a set of alphabets optimized for carving into wood.
> writing is a ... correspondence between marks and elements of human language
Yes, this is what I had in mind by saying "speech", but you're right, the connection to language is the essential part, and sound just happens to be the paradigmatic medium of human language
Written numbers and math were born out of accounting. Who owed how much to whom. This could be similar to that, although I think the societies of that time were collectivist enough to not worry much about debt.
> A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.
> So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language
Okay, so what's the bar for "written language" then?
The specialists in this field appear to be using some criteria for "written language" but it is not clear to me how that criteria might accept maths symbols or maybe roman numerals to indicate counters as a written language while discarding a notation system.
Personally, I would consider that any form of intentional knowledge transmission a "written language".
Scratch a line onto a rock each time you see a full moon? That's written language.
Paint handprints on a cave wall? That's written language too.
How does this discovery fail my criteria?
Discovery doesn't fail your criteria, however I don't think most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language. Certainly doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Well, for me the intention matters; is the intention communication (and yes, art is communication as well - it communicates the artists feelings at the time)?
If the intention is to communicate how many moons have passed, why is tally marks not considered written language?
We talk about the language of mathematics, and no one bats an eye, but tally marks still fall into the category of language of mathematics.
I am seeing the stated criteria as a distinction without a difference: The intentional mark `5` signifying how many moons have passed is somehow different to the intentional mark `|||||`, but no one is explaining what the difference is.
I don't think the linguists would consider arabic numerals on their own to be a language either. The main distinction, as I understand it, is having something like a grammar, i.e. a set of consistent rules about how to arrange the symbols to have meaning beyond just the sum of the meaning of each individual symbol. So no matter how you mark down your count, it's not language until you have some consistent pattern of signifying that that means how many moons have passed, or how many people are in the local community, or something like that.
> most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language.
How about emojis?
> most people would agree that hand prints and tally marks are written language.
> How about emojis?
Goo question; those are literally to communicate :-/