How a furniture conservator helped crack the code of Ice Age cave art | 24CA News

Scientists say they’ve begun to decipher the symbols on Ice Age cave artwork  — and it began with a hunch by an enthusiastic layperson. 

Ben Bacon, a London furnishings conservator and novice anthropologist, was pictures of paleolithic cave drawings when he began to note patterns within the dots, traces and different symbols which might be typically scrawled over depictions of animals. 

“I’m afraid I’m slightly obsessive, and once I started looking at these, I looked at more and more,” Bacon informed As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “You do become quite absorbed in this. It’s very beautiful.”

Bacon teamed up with lecturers at Durham University and University College London, in addition to two different hobbyist archaeologists in his circle, to take a more in-depth look. 

The researchers recognized the markings as a “proto-writing” system, used to trace details about the depicted animals — together with their migration routes and mating cycles.

Their findings — revealed within the Cambridge Archaeological Journal — recommend that individuals who lived some 20,000 years in the past had a complicated and sensible manner of speaking vital details about the animals they hunted.

‘A little bit of a revelation’

It all started when Bacon was poring by pictures of cave artwork, and observed that a number of totally different drawings of fish have been accompanied by both three bars or three dots.

“I thought it must be a communication system of some sort,” he mentioned. “Then I looked to see if anyone had actually figured out what these marks meant. And apparently they hadn’t, which was a bit of a revelation.”

His work piqued the curiosity of  Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, and co-author of the examine. He informed BBC News he is “glad he took it seriously” when Bacon reached out.

Pettitt introduced the subject to his longtime collaborator, Durham psychologist Robert Kentridge. Together, the pair had been working to interpret the meanings of — and motivations behind — historic cave artwork.

“[Bacon’s] theories, especially given the mass of data he had compiled, seemed ripe for testing,” Kentridge informed CBC in an e mail.

Together, the staff checked out a whole lot of pictures from the European Upper Paleolithic period. They targeted on three symbols — Ys, traces, and dots— and decided the latter two made up a lunar calendar. 

“They were using this calendar to record and locate their prey for future hunts,” Bacon mentioned. “I think this was giving them just that little edge in their daily battle, you know, managing resources, being efficient hunters.”

On that calendar, the researchers theorize the “Y” represents giving start, which means the hunter-gatherers have been monitoring animals’ reproductive cycles. The examine notes the symbolism of 1 line changing into two, or “two parted legs.” 

The indisputable fact that it took so lengthy to establish these markers is emblematic of how trendy people underestimate their predecessors, Bacon mentioned. 

“We think of ourselves as the peak of civilization. So it never occurred to us that someone 40,000 years ago could, for example, be as bright as we are,” he mentioned.

“Maybe the problem was in our heads, that we thought this couldn’t be, therefore we didn’t bother looking.”

‘Yet to be confirmed’

April Nowell, a University of Victoria anthropologist who makes a speciality of paleolithic artwork and archaeology, says she welcomes research that take a more in-depth take a look at such symbols.

She says they’re typically “overlooked because they are less spectacular or their meanings [are] less obvious” than, for instance, the animal drawings themselves. 

“But I think there are a number of assumptions being made here that have yet to be proven,” she cautioned in an e mail to CBC.

Nowell says she’s not satisfied the findings supply ample proof to establish a calendar, and questions why the paleolithic individuals would begin their calendar within the spring and abandon it within the winter.

What’s extra, she questioned the examine’s interpretation of the Y image. 

“I am having some difficulty with that in that the majority of animals considered in this study are quadrupeds and humans normally squat giving birth,” she mentioned. “If this sign is supposed to be iconic of the birth process, it is not obvious to me.”

Kentbridge famous that start is only one doable interpretation for the Y image. Bacon mentioned the speculation just isn’t based mostly on symbolism alone, however archeological proof. He says they discovered a correlation between Y and the start cycles and birthplaces of the animals they analyzed.

Nowell additionally says the symbols usually are not fairly refined sufficient to be thought-about “proto-writing,” because it lacks all of the items of language, like nouns, verbs, pronouns, and many others. 

Finally, Nowell cautioned that the authors solely checked out three of at the very least 32 recurring characters in artwork samples. 

“Even if the authors are correct about dots, lines and Y-signs, we still don’t know what 90 per cent of the signs mean, and they didn’t address when these signs occur in other contexts and what that might tell us,” she mentioned.

“Knowing what images they don’t occur with or if they occur in isolation is as important and could change our understanding of their meanings.”

On that entrance, Bacon agrees. He says there’s plenty of work left to be executed — each by way of deciphering the symbols, and mapping their complexity.

“This is only the beginning,” he mentioned. “There are upwards of 100 signs in this world, and we are steadily working away at them.”