Amateur archaeologist has revealed that Ice Age signs were a lunar calendar
Amateur archaeologist Ben Bacon has discovered a primitive writing system of Ice Age hunter-gatherers. He believes the signs put up 20,000 years ago were a lunar calendar, writes The Guardian.
Rock paintings are not just a form of artistic expression, Bacon believes, but records of the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.
The amateur archaeologist has appealed to professional scientists with his hypothesis. And they supported him. Bacon ended up working with a team that included two professors from Durham University and one from University College London. He also published an article in a scientific journal, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Rock paintings depicting reindeer, fish and bison have been found all over Europe. Alongside them, sequences of dots have also been found on cave walls. Archaeologists assumed long ago that they also had a meaning, but could not decipher it. Bacon and his team managed to do just that.
Because such signs recorded information numerically rather than recorded speech, they are not considered “writing” in the sense of the pictographic and cuneiform systems that emerged in Sumer beginning in 3,400 BC, but are classified as proto-literature.
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