signs

A new study has revealed that mysterious signs carved onto Paleolithic artifacts up to 40,000 years ago match the information density of the world's earliest known writing system — pushing the deep roots of human communication tens of thousands of years before ancient Mesopotamia. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research by linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin has surprised even its own authors. Far from being idle decoration, these repetitive sequences of lines, dots, crosses and notches appear to represent a deliberate, structured system of Paleolithic proto-writing — one that predates Mesopotamian cuneiform by more than 35,000 years. Breakthrough in the