New Delhi. Till now we have been reading in books that the art of writing started about 5,000 years ago with the ‘Proto-Cuneiform’ script of Mesopotamia. But a research published recently in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS) has completely challenged this claim. Scientists have found such evidence in the hills of Germany, which show that humans had learned to convey their messages to others through symbols and signs only 40,000 years ago. This discovery is not only old, but it also proves that the man of the Stone Age was as intelligent as the man of today. He not only hunted, but also used a special system to store and share complex information. These artifacts found in the Swabian Jura region of Germany are presenting the history of communication in an entirely new context.
Did the art of writing begin 40 thousand years ago?
Eva Dutkiewicz, co-author of this research and archaeologist from the Museum of Prehistory in Berlin, said that these remains are from the period when Homo Sapiens left Africa. They were settling in Europe and were encountering Neanderthal humans. Scientists have analyzed about 260 such things found from the caves of Germany, which have strange marks on them. These include small sculptures made from mammoth tusk and the famous ‘adorant’ carvings. All these have repeatedly repeated lines, crosses, dots and grooves. The team entered more than 3,000 such geometric marks into a database and examined them with the help of computer tools. Surprisingly, these marks were not a random design, but were part of a deliberate pattern.
What do these ‘secret codes’ of primitive humans indicate?
Linguist Christian Benz of Germany’s Saarland University says that he used advanced methods like ‘quantitative linguistics’ and ‘statistical modeling’ to understand these marks. In the research it was seen whether these marks contained as much information as was contained in the scripts developed later. Analysis showed that these symbols had the ability to code information. Interestingly, a lot of similarities were seen between the early writing of Mesopotamia and these 40,000 year old marks. This means that the method of writing remained almost the same for thousands of years. Although scientists have not yet been able to fully decode these messages, they are completely confident that these marks were not part of any spoken language. When scientists looked deeply at the pattern of these marks, they came to know some special things. The same type of marks like ‘cross-cross-cross’ or ‘line-line-line’ were repeated on these artefacts. According to Benz, this kind of repetition is not found in any spoken language. Therefore, it cannot be considered as ‘speech’ i.e. written form of speaking. But this does not mean that they were useless. This ornamental sculpture is approximately 38,000 years old. It contains a small ivory plate with a human figure and several marks and dots on it. The use of these marks suggests a notation system, especially in the lines of dots on the back of the plate. (Credit: Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch) These marks were a kind of ‘intercommunication’. Research found that the information density in the marks made on statues was 15 percent higher than the marks made on tools or jewelry. That means different types of information were coded on different things.
Was the brain of Stone Age man similar to that of today’s man?
This new discovery has confirmed another big truth. That is, in terms of mental capacity, the man of the Stone Age was not at all behind the man of today. They had the same ability to store and organize information as we have today. Just as we use emoji or computer coding today, humans 40,000 years ago used these symbols. Ava Dutkiewicz says that we have just scratched the surface, many more such sequences remain to be discovered. These marks continued to be used in the same pattern for about 10,000 years and then suddenly disappeared. The mystery still remains as to why this system ended and how different the Mesopotamian script was from it.
Is this discovery enough to change the history books?
Certainly this discovery changes the way we look at history. Till now it was believed that the need for writing was felt only after farming and settled life started. But now it is clear that hunters and nomadic humans also used ‘sign system’ to keep their memories or data safe. Although these did not translate into a complete language like the Mesopotamian script, they laid the foundation for modern communication.
