Home
Membership
40,000 years ago, our ancestors left these strange symbols behind. What do they really mean?

40,000 years ago, our ancestors left these strange symbols behind. What do they really mean?

Research has unveiled a 43,000-year-old system of symbols – but is it evidence of a forerunner of writing systems, or something altogether different?

Three prehistoric objects showing engraved markings, including a carved bone, a small decorated plaque, and a stone figure with incised lines.

Colin Barras

Published: April 17, 2026 at 2:13 PM

Save

Writing is a tool for documenting ideas and events, and its invention transformed human history.

It’s widely accepted that this world-changing technology was invented independently in at least four places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Of these four great centres of innovation, it was in Mesopotamia and Egypt that the technology first emerged. Both ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform are roughly 5,200 years old.

Thanks to archaeology, it’s also possible to trace the technological innovations that preceded writing, eventually evolving into it. In Mesopotamia, about 9,500 years ago, traders were using small lumps of clay as numerical tokens to help calculate the value of goods. They soon began encapsulating these tokens in hollow clay balls, perhaps to signify trade transactions that were considered settled and permanent. These clay balls were opaque, so administrators made impressions on the outer surface to represent the tokens held inside.

An important third step occurred roughly 5,500 years ago, when traders dispensed entirely with the tokens and flattened out the clay balls. These were still marked with impressions representing the now-abandoned tokens, producing the first clay tablets bearing symbols – a clear forerunner of cuneiform: the world's oldest writing system, marked onto clay tablets.

Clay surface covered in rows of cuneiform script impressed with wedge-shaped marks.

Pressed into clay with a stylus, cuneiform was one of the world’s earliest writing systems, developed in ancient Mesopotamia around 3000 BC. Used for everything from administration to literature, it marked a major shift from symbolic markings to structured written language, enabling the recording of laws, trade, and stories across early civilizations. (Photo by Getty Images)

All the steps in this technological journey took place within the past 10,000 years.

But in early 2026, one team of researchers made a striking claim. According to them, there is evidence that humans associated with the Aurignacian culture (which existed in Palaeolithic Europe between around 43,000 and 26,000 years ago) developed a system of signs and markings that shared features in common with a forerunner of cuneiform writing.

The announcement was interpreted by some as proof that the roots of writing are far older than had been thought – by an order of tens of thousands of years.

A Stone Age script?

Archaeologists have known for a century that the Aurignacians carved marks onto the surface of bones and small figurines. These marks include rows of dots or crosses. They were clearly intentionally made, but no one had taken the trouble to seriously analyse and interpret them, says Christian Bentz, a computational linguist at Saarland University in Germany.

He and his colleague, archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Berlin State Museums in Germany, have now performed such an analysis. The two researchers focused in particular on the potential for the marks to encode information. Essentially, this involves measuring the degree of variety in a sequence of marks: a row of identical crosses has little potential to convey information, but a row containing different symbols could be information dense. This is why a string of alphabetic symbols (like this sentence, or any word) can convey a complex message.

This ivory plaque, known as the 'Adorant' from Geißenklösterle Cave in the Ach Valley shows a human figure with lion features on one side and rows of dots example on the other. It is 40,000 years old.(Photo by University of Tübingen / Hildegard Jensen)

Bentz and Dutkiewicz compared the marks on the Aurignacian objects to 5,500-year-old Mesopotamian inscriptions written using a forerunner of cuneiform known as proto-cuneiform. To their surprise, they discovered that both the Aurignacian markings and proto-cuneiform had a similar information-carrying potential.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says Bentz, speaking to HistoryExtra. “I thought I must have messed up the analysis somehow.” But even after checking and rechecking the results, the finding stood.

That comparison is sound, according to linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly at the University of New England in Australia. But this isn’t because the Aurignacians had developed a Stone Age script; it’s because the proto-cuneiform inscriptions can hardly be considered writing at all.

Proto-cuneiform clearly resembles writing, particularly since it was produced using the tools – a stylus and clay tablet – we associate with Mesopotamian cuneiform. But the information it encodes is very basic, because the earliest versions of proto-cuneiform employed a very limited number of distinct signs, representing a restricted set of ideas.

Read more | 'Green-eyed monster' and 'stiff upper lip’: the evolution of the English language

Proto-cuneiform only developed a much richer “dictionary” of signs by about 5,200 years ago, and it was then that it had the potential to store more information. Indeed, Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s analysis confirms this, showing that later proto-cuneiform inscriptions have a far greater information-carrying potential than the Aurignacian marks.

“It can look as if there is a neat continuity between [the early and late proto-cuneiform inscriptions],” says Kelly, speaking to HistoryExtra. “But they are categorically different systems.” Cuneiform is writing, proto-cuneiform isn’t, says Kelly. He, and many other scholars, prefer not to label any of the proto-cuneiform inscriptions (even the later, richer proto-cuneiform examples) with the W-word.

Writing, says Kelly, is a system for encoding linguistic information – in simple terms, a tool for recording speech. This means writing involves assigning specific sound values to signs. Proto-cuneiform never did this.

Its sign for “sheep” – a cross inside a circle – tells us nothing about how ancient Mesopotamians voiced the word “sheep”.

In fact, it wasn’t until about 4,900 years ago that Mesopotamians began encoding speech with writing, repurposing signs to represent spoken syllables. This, according to Kelly, is when writing was actually invented in the region. “The various notational systems that preceded and influenced this innovation were simply part of the symbolic raw material that made writing possible,” he says.

In other words, the Aurignacian artefacts don’t necessarily show us that writing has roots stretching back 43,000 years. They only show us that humans were iteratively experimenting with the technologies that would allow for the invention of writing, tens of thousands of years later.

Searching for meaning in the Stone Age

But why were humans experimenting with signs 43,000 years ago?

“It is generally accepted that the signs have a communication function,” says archaeologist April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada, speaking to HistoryExtra about the research. “We have known for a long time that they are not random.”

However, not everyone is convinced by this idea.

Archaeologist Silvia Ferrara at the University of Bologna in Italy and her colleagues recently published an analysis of even older marks, these produced by members of our species in southern Africa roughly 65,000 years ago. The marks in question include parallel lines or crosshatched grids, carefully scratched into the surface of ostrich eggshell fragments.

Speaking to HistoryExtra, Ferrara says the analysis deliberately avoided making any assumptions about the purpose of those marks, instead merely exploring the cognitive behaviours that allowed humans to produce them in the first place. “Writing was not part of the picture,” she says. The suggestion is that humans began intentionally producing marks on objects long before they began assigning any communicative meaning to those marks.

Small Paleolithic figurine of a stylised female form with exaggerated curves, carved from stone.

The Venus of Savignano, dating to around 25,000 BC, reflects the artistic traditions of the Aurignacian and Gravettian periods, when early humans began producing symbolic carvings and marks. Like other figurines of this era, its features could relate to ideas about fertility, illustrating how early mark-making evolved beyond simple engravings into three-dimensional expressions of meaning. (Photo by Getty Images)

Predictably, these ideas complicate our understanding of the Aurignacian marks.

While Bentz and Dutkiewicz showed they had the potential to store information, that doesn’t mean they actually did. “I’m not convinced they have the same kind of information content as the proto-cuneiform signs, for which we can often assign definite meanings,” says computational linguist Richard Sproat at Sakana.ai in Japan, commenting on the research to HistoryExtra.

And, there is one more factor to consider, says Kelly.

From our modern perspective, writing often serves as a substitute for speech, conveying every detail of a message. But non-writing sign systems are more complex. For instance, indigenous Australians have long made use of a communication device known as the message stick – typically a length of wood engraved with a series of marks. But, says Kelly, the message stick is just one element in the communication process. “Message stick communication is highly multimodal involving spoken language, gesture and body paint,” he says. “As such, message sticks can be thought of as an almost supplementary prop within a multi-channel communicative routine.” They cannot be understood in isolation.

This doesn’t mean that the Aurignacian artefacts, and the marks they carried, were part of a similarly elaborate multi-channel communication system. But it does serve as a reminder that we might be missing important context that could help us understand how – if at all – the artefacts helped convey a message.

“Anthropologists have always championed the importance of ‘being there’ as an active participant-observer in the communities they want to understand,” says Kelly. Because it’s impossible for archaeologists to “be there” with the Aurignacians, we may never work out how they used the artefacts they left behind.

Authors

Colin BarrasFreelance journalist