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Carved in Time: The Signs of the Swabian Jura
The objects at the heart of this study were found in caves in the Swabian Jura region of southwest Germany, and date to the Aurignacian period — the era when some of the earliest Homo sapiens were arriving in Europe and encountering Neanderthals. Among the most remarkable is a tiny mammoth figurine from Vogelherd Cave, carved from mammoth ivory and engraved with neat rows of crosses and dots. Another key artifact is the "Adorant," an ivory plaque from Geißenklösterle Cave bearing the image of a hybrid lion-human figure, surrounded by orderly sequences of notches. The famous Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave — the oldest known figurative sculpture in the world — is also engraved with notches placed at regular intervals along its arm.
The team examined over 3,000 signs on 260 such objects, cataloguing 22 distinct symbol types including V-shaped notches, lines, crosses, dots, zigzags and stars. "The Swabian Jura is one of the regions where objects with this type of sign have been found most frequently, but there are, of course, other important regions," explained Dutkiewicz. "Countless tools and sculptures from the Paleolithic, or the Old Stone Age, bear intentional sign sequences."
The Adorant from Geißenklösterle Cave, bearing rows of notches and dots. (Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch/CC BY 4.0)
A Statistical Fingerprint Across the Ages
Using computational approaches drawn from quantitative linguistics — including statistical modelling and machine learning algorithms — Bentz and Dutkiewicz measured the entropy, or information density, of the sign sequences. Their aim was not to decipher meaning, but to identify measurable structural properties. What they found was striking: the 40,000-year-old sign sequences were clearly distinct from modern alphabetic writing, which directly encodes spoken language. But their statistical profile was a near match for the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, which came roughly 35,000 years later.
"Our findings show that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers developed a system of symbols that has an information density statistically comparable to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, which came 40,000 years later," explained Bentz.
Both the Stone Age sequences and early cuneiform are characterized by high rates of repetition — cross, cross, cross, line, line, line — rather than the varied combinations found in language. The researchers also found that figurines carried about 15 percent higher information density than tools, and that different sign types appeared consistently on specific object categories, suggesting deliberate, rule-governed use.
A proto-cuneiform clay tablet from the late Uruk period, c. 3300–3100 BC. (Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)/CC BY-SA 4.0)
What Did the Signs Mean?
The study makes no claim to have deciphered the signs, and the researchers are candid that their exact meaning may never be known. However, the patterns themselves offer tantalising hints. Crosses were never found on objects depicting humans, yet appeared frequently on tools and carvings of animals such as mammoths and horses. Dots, by contrast, were never used on tools at all. The Adorant plaque, for instance, features rows of 12 or 13 notches, which Dutkiewicz suggests may reflect calendric observations — tracking lunar cycles or the passage of seasons. "It makes sense that these people might want to keep track of time," she noted in New Scientist.
Palaeoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, who has spent years cataloguing 32 recurring geometric symbols found in European cave art, welcomed the findings. "What this study shows is that the way that the marks are being used on the Aurignacian pieces has a type of configuration that closely matches proto-cuneiform," she said. "They're showing that there is pattern repetition and organisation." Crucially, these conventions held stable for at least 10,000 years, which strongly suggests they were passed down across generations — meaning this was a shared cultural practice, not spontaneous individual expression.
Rewriting the Dawn of Human Communication
Perhaps the most profound implication of the study is what it suggests about early human cognition. The A to Z of ancient writing systems has long begun with cuneiform, around 3200 BC, and later alphabets descended from it. This research does not overturn that timeline — the Aurignacian signs did not evolve into cuneiform and disappeared after about 10,000 years — but it does reveal that the cognitive capacity for structured information encoding is far older than previously understood. "The human ability to encode information in signs and symbols was developed over many thousands of years. Writing is only one specific form in a long series of sign systems," said Bentz.
It is also a reminder that prehistoric bookkeeping and information storage did not begin with clay tablets. Our ancestors were, in many senses, already thinking and communicating symbolically in ways that laid the groundwork for everything from cuneiform to the alphabet — and perhaps, eventually, to the words you are reading now.
Top image: The mammoth figurine from Vogelherd Cave, approximately 40,000 years old, bearing multiple sequences of crosses and dots. Source: Universität Tübingen / Hildegard Jensen, CC-BY-SA 4.0, via New Scientist
By Gary Manners
References
Bentz, C. 2026. Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2520385123\
Bower, B. 2026. These 40,000-year-old marks may be a precursor to writing. ScienceAlert. Available at: https://www.sciencealert.com/these-40000-year-old-marks-may-be-a-precursor-to-writing\
George, A. 2026. Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing. New Scientist. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516606-stone-age-symbols-may-push-back-the-earliest-form-of-writing/\
Phys.org. 2026. 40,000-year-old Stone Age symbols may have paved the way for writing, long before Mesopotamia. Available at: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-year-stone-age-paved-mesopotamia.html\
