Ben Bacon, a furniture restorer from London, has unbelievably unraveled the mystery of the 20,000-year-old cave paintings made by our ancestors.
Various examples of ice age rock art. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Journal
A London furniture restorer passionate about millennial rock art has managed to reveal the mysterious meaning of the drawings left in the caves by our ancestors during the Ice Age, thanks to the collaboration of a few scientists who encouraged him to continue the laborious investigations . . The man, Bennet (Ben) Bacon, guessed that the non-figurative signs and symbols left in caves across Europe – which mostly depicted animals – referred to some sort of lunar calendar, with indications of the seasons. of prey reproduction and the months of I leave. In simple terms, the symbols associated with the drawings were real notes, to communicate to others valuable information for the survival of the entire hunter-gatherer community. We are therefore in front of the first writing known in the history ofa wise manas the authors of the study explain.
In addition to Mr Bacon, other independent researchers (friends of his) collaborated on the extraordinary discovery, Professor Tony Freet of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London and Professors Paul Pettitt and Robert Kentridge of the university of Durham, from the Departments of Archeology and Psychology respectively. Mr. Bacon began his personal investigation by sifting through images of multiple cave paintings from the last Ice Age (Upper Paleolithic), found in 400 caves across Europe. Among the most famous drawings are those of the French caves of Lascaux and Chauvet and the cave of Altamira in Spain, where the most important and abundant works of our ancestors are kept. Doing research on the internet and at the British Library, as the BBC said, Mr Bacon began to detect patterns in the signs found on the paintings, some of which repeated as lines, dots and dashes. a Y-shaped symbol.
Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Journal
Collaborating with experts, attracted by his intuition on a possible connection of the symbols with a lunar and phenological calendar (phenology records relevant events in the development of living beings), Bacon came to the conclusion that the Y had the meaning of “give birth”., while the line line and dot were numbers linked to the months and were part of a “local phenological/weather calendar which begins in the spring and records the weather from that point in the lunar months” . Simply put, the symbols corresponded to the seasons of animal love and were linked to the births of a specific lunar month; in practice, these were records of the reproductive cycles of prey, which were of great importance to the survival of ancient hunter-gatherer communities. No wonder carved images of cattle, mammoths, horses, fish, reindeer and other animals that our ancestors ate have been found on the rocks.
Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Journal
“Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and communicate seasonal behavioral information about specific prey taxa in the geographic regions of interest. We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constitutes a complete unit of meaning – a notation system combined with its subject – which gives us specific insight into what a set of notation marks indicates. study summary. So our ancestors were “much more like us than we thought,” Bacon told the BBC. After all, they nurtured their culture by producing extraordinary art, intimately linked with invaluable information for the life of the community. Details of the research “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar” have been published in the specialist scientific journal Cambridge Archaeological Journal.