Main Image: The mammoth figurine from Vogelherd Cave, approximately 40,000 years old, bears multiple sequences of crosses and dots on its surface. Credit: Universität Tübingen / Hildegard Jensen, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Around 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors carved signs into tools and sculptures. These character sequences have the same complexity and information density as the earliest proto-cuneiform script around 3,000 BC – tens of thousands of years later. This was discovered by linguist Christian Bentz from Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz from the Museum of Prehistory and Early History of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
The team examined more than 3,000 characters on 260 objects using computer methods and thus tracked down the DNA of the writing. The clarity of the results, which they publish in the journal PNAS, surprised even the researchers.
Lines, notches, dots or crosses that are often repeated – finds from the Palaeolithic Age, 34,000 years old, sometimes even 45,000 years old, bear mysterious strings of characters. Many such artefacts have been discovered in caves in the Swabian Alb: for example, a small mammoth found in the Vogelherd Cave in the Lone Valley. A Stone Age man carved it out of a mammoth tusk and carefully carved rows of crosses and dots. Signs can also be found on finds from the “Geißenklösterle”, a cave in the Ach Valley: Uniform rows of dots and notches adorn the so-called “Adorant”, an ivory plate depicting a hybrid creature of lion and man. And if you look closely, the lion man from the Hohlenstein barn in the Lone Valley also wears regular notches on his arm, also a mythical creature, part animal, part human.
New findings now suggest that the people of the Stone Age deliberately applied such signs to certain artefacts: The signs carry information and record their world of thought. “With our research, we are tracking down the statistical fingerprint of sign systems. The Stone Age sign sequences are an early alternative to writing,” explains Professor Christian Bentz from Saarland University.
“The Swabian Alb is one of the world’s most important discovery regions, but there are many other sites. Numerous tools and sculptures from the Palaeolithic, the Palaeolithic Age, bear deliberately placed sequences of signs,” says archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz. The two researchers travel together across Europe to museums and sites, always in search of new Stone Age signs. “So far, we have only scratched the surface of what can be found in terms of drawing sequences on a wide variety of artefacts,” says Ewa Dutkiewicz, who is a research assistant and curator at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
“The artifacts date from a time shortly after Homo sapiens began to colonize Europe from Africa, where they met Neanderthals – tens of thousands of years before the beginnings of writing,” explains the archaeologist. With their research team, the two are on the trail of the information code of the Stone Age: They are researching the threads in a project funded by the European Research Council.
Statistically comparable information density to proto-cuneiform
The team analysed more than 3,000 geometric signs on around 260 objects using computer methods. The aim was not to decipher the concrete meaning of the signs. This is still in the dark. “There are plenty of theories about this. But very little was known about the basic, measurable properties of the signs until now,” says Bentz. He researches what can be said about the signs: measurable characteristics and frequency patterns in order to determine similarities and differences to later sign systems. The linguist is looking for the statistical DNA of the character sequences.
“With our evaluations, we can first prove that the character sequences have nothing in common with our current script, which depicts spoken languages and has a high density of information. On the archaeological finds, on the other hand, we have signs that are repeated very often – cross, cross, cross, line, line, line – spoken languages do not have these repetitive structures,” explains Christian Bentz. “But our results also show that the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic Age developed a sign system with a statistically comparable density of information to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia – a full 40 millennia later. Character sequences of proto-cuneiform writing are also repetitive, so the individual characters are repeated comparatively often. The character sequences are comparable in terms of their complexity,” the linguist notes. “The density of information is higher on figurines than on tools,” says archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz, who also curated the Vogelherd Archaeopark in the Swabian Alb for a while.
This result surprised the research duo. “We would have suspected that early proto-cuneiform writing would also come much closer to today’s writing systems – if only because of the relative temporal proximity. However, the more we looked into it, the clearer it became how structurally similar the early proto-cuneiform script is to the much older Paleolithic character sequences,” says Ewa Dutkiewicz. This also means that little has apparently changed between the Paleolithic Age and the first proto-cuneiform script. “After that, around 5,000 years ago, a new system emerged relatively suddenly that reproduces spoken language – of course, we find completely different statistical properties,” notes Christian Bentz.
Computer analysis for Palaeolithic signs
For its research, the research team digitizes the character sequences of Palaeolithic finds in a database and determines the statistical properties of the Stone Age sign inventories: Using computer-aided methods, Bentz compared the potential of expressing information through signs with that of early cuneiform sequences and also with modern writing. To do this, the researchers used methods from quantitative linguistics: They used statistical models and classification algorithms of machine learning.
“We were able to show that as a result of the high repetition rates of the Paleolithic signs and the easy predictability of the subsequent sign, the so-called entropy – a measure of information density – is comparable to the much later proto-cuneiform,” Christian Bentz summarizes the results. “The ability of humans to encode information via signs and symbols has developed over many millennia. Writing is only a specific form of a long series of sign systems,” he explains. “This development continues: coding is also the basis of computer systems.” Large language models, which are now seen as a prime example of AI, are based on the predictability of speech sequences, i.e. on the fact that they determine the probability of the next part of the word.
On the trail of the information code of the Stone Age
What exactly the Stone Age people wanted to hold on to through their signs is not revealed by this. “But the new findings could help narrow down possible interpretations,” says Ewa Dutkiewicz. Even though humans at that time lacked thousands of years of information and knowledge transfer, anatomically Stone Age man was at a similar level of development to today’s humans. They were probably as cognitively efficient as we are. Recording and passing on information and knowledge was enormously important for the people of the Paleolithic Age in order to survive or, for example, to coordinate a group. “They were skilled craftsmen. You can tell that they were carrying the objects with them. Many of them fit very well in the hand, are just big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. This is also similar with the proto-cuneiform tablets,” says Ewa Dutkiewicz.
The research is part of the project “The Evolution of Visual Information Coding”, EVINE for short, which is funded by the European Research Council with an ERC Starting Grant. Professor Christian Bentz, who moved to Saarland University in 2025, is leading the project, which started at the University of Tübingen and was initially continued at the University of Passau at the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics. Together with Dr. Ewa Dutkiewicz, he investigates how visual information encoding has evolved from the earliest characters to writing. (ERC, EVINE, 101117111).
https://www.erc-evine.de/
Video documentation of the Stone Age sign hunt Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz record
their journeys of discovery to museums and sites of Stone Age artefacts on video and thus document their Stone Age sign hunt on the platform Youtube: 9 videos document the researchers journey of documentation and discovery
Publication details
Bentz, Christian, Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2520385123
Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
