According to the media, "mysterious signs" engraved on objects reveal that "a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system" (Alison George, '
Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing' New Scientish Magazine
23 February 2026)
Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to a study of mysterious signs engraved on figurines and other artefacts found in Germany. If confirmed, this pushes back the emergence of a proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years.
The New York Post is buying it (Ben Cost, '
Scientists discover oldest form of writing in mysterious Stone Age engravings' NYP Feb. 24, 2026)
The origins of writing aren’t set in stone.
The ancient cave peoples weren’t as illiterate as portrayed in popular media. Archaeologists have discovered Paleolithic glyphs in a German cave that could potentially push back the history of written communication by over 30,000 years, per a rock-solid study in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences.
According to the researchers, the symbols were engraved on artifacts that dated back some 40,000 years to the Stone Age, when early humans arrived in Europe from Africa and encountered the Neanderthals.
Despite their age, these ancient etchings boasted a complexity comparable to the early stages of the world’s oldest writing system, cuneiform, which originated around 5,000 years ago, the New Scientist reported.
The research is a little more nuanced in its claims ('
Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [of the United States of America], 23 Feb 2026, NB published the same day as the popular New Scientist article was) by
Christian Bentz (linguist, of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken) and Ewa Dutkiewicz (archaeologist Stone Age Department, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin). It is a really odd piece.
The underlying assumption is that "As humans, we store and share information" well, my cat has information about the whole area that is his territory and if he had kittens, he'd be sharing that with them, as do the chickens in the yard. What a silly generalisation, it is a characteristic of many animals. Then: "Our hominin ancestors harnessed the surfaces of mobile artifacts and cave walls as information carriers since the Paleolithic time period" that is again an assumption that seems designed to lead to the conclusions the authors are heading to (a cat pees on a fencepost to 'mark' it, is the fencepost a 'tool' for "carrying information"? A bee wiggles its arse towards its hive-mates to tell them how far to fly to the rape field - is his backside a tool, a carrier, or is that the wiggle?).
Anyway, for whatever reason, these two analysed a corpus of 260 mobile objects adorned with several thousand geometric signs from the Swabian Aurignacian (43,000 to 34,000 y old) from a cluster of cave sites in southwestern Germany ("the first modern humans to settle in Central Europe"). They were etched with a total of 22 different recurring symbols, including a V-shaped notch and lines, crosses and dots. They applied "classification algorithms and statistical models to capture their quantitative properties". They found that these showed that the statistical properties of these sign sequences "are comparable to sign sequences on the earliest protocuneiform tablets" and that there were (quelle surprise) more Paleolithic signs "on certain types of objects, e.g. ivory figurines compared to tools". We tend to have less ornament on hammers and screwdrivers even today too. They reckon these symbols on these signed objects "were systematically applied to yield higher information density". In conclusion:
"These results cannot be taken to strictly prove that Aurignacian sign sequences encoded numero-ideographic information as in the case of protocuneiform. However, they prove that the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Europe already applied sign sequences of comparable complexity in a deliberate, systematic, and conventional manner—several ten thousand years before the advent of genuine writing.
So, they are, or they are not some kind of precocious script or not?
Yet there is nothing much new in this idea.
In 1970 Alexander Marshack (1918 – 2004), US independent scholar and Paleolithic archaeologist - research associate at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University - published his text '
Notation dans les gravures du Paléolithique Supérieur' in which he argued that tally marks on certain bones from French caves and also sites further afield represented a system of proto-writing, and proposed that notches and lines carved on certain Upper Paleolithic bone plaques were notation systems (specifically lunar calendars). Marshack showed that seemingly random or meaningless notches on bone were sometimes interpretable as structured series of numbers. He expanded upon these ideas in his book,
The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation (1972, 1991 reprint) [
selective list of other works by Marshack]. Marshack's work has been criticized as having over-interpreted many artifacts, finding numerical and calendrical patterns where none exist (Robinson 1992; see also
review of 1991 reprint by Iain Davidson). Nonetheless, his work had a major impact on the study of Paleolithic art - though to judge from this text, apparently not so much in Germany.
Reference:
Robinson, Judy 1992, 'Not counting on Marshack: a reassessment of the work of Alexander Marshack on notation in the Upper Palaeolithic', Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2(1): 1-16'
