Sometimes, you need an amateur! Follow the link to learn more, readers:
A Total Amateur May Have Just Rewritten Human History With Bombshell Discovery
Ben Bacon is “effectively a person off the street,” but he and his academic co-authors think they’ve found the earliest writing in human history.
January 5, 2023, 12:46pm
In what may be a major archaeological breakthrough, an independent researcher has suggested that the earliest writing in human history has been hiding in plain sight in prehistoric cave paintings in Europe, a discovery that would push the timeline of written language back by tens of thousands of years, reports a new study.
Hundreds of European caves are decorated with mesmerizing paintings of animals and other figures that were made by our species between roughly 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the Palaeolithic Age when humans were still hunter-gatherers. These cave paintings often include non-figurative markings, such as dots and lines, that have evaded explanation for decades.
Ben Bacon, a furniture conservator based in London, U.K. who has described himself as “effectively a person off the street,” happened to notice these markings while admiring images of European cave art, and developed a hunch that they could be decipherable. Now, Bacon has unveiled what he believes is “the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens,” in the form of a prehistoric lunar calendar, according to a study published on Thursday in the Cambridge Archeological Journal.
A Song of Joy by Caroline Furlong 
Neat, if true. OTOH, I saw some skepticism from archaeology-twitter simply from the fact that the time spans involved are longer than most human language / culture groups tend to last.
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May have been more static at the time
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I haz dubyus in either case, but it is a cool theory. 🙂
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This brings to mind when the tectonic plate theory proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912 was widely rejected by established science. Now, granted, Wegener was a scientist in relevant fields of geology and geophysics whereas Ben Bacon is primarily a furniture conservator. But he didn’t go it alone, and his theory is built on prior research. From the linked article in Vice, “Previous researchers have suggested that these symbols could be some form of numerical notation, perhaps designed to count the number of animals sighted or killed by these prehistoric artists. Bacon made the leap to suggest that they form a calendar system designed to track the life cycles of animals depicted in the paintings. He enlisted leading archaeologists from Durham University and the University College London to develop the idea and co-author the new study.”
The guy could well be right.
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This is interesting, but I enjoy more the stories about artifacts that archaeologists call “ritual devices” that experts in other fields are able to identify as practical tools. 😀
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