PAUL SIEVEKING joins the Palæolithic dots and digs up the latest archæological discoveries
CAVE DOTS DECIPHERED
Researchers had suspected for decades that the seemingly random dots and stripes on cave paintings across Europe held hidden meaning, but were unable to decipher it. Thanks to the work of a pioneering amateur, a London furniture conservator called Ben Bacon, over seven years the code has now been cracked. The first major revelation is that ancient people used the paintings to track the mating and birth times of wild animals such as cattle, horses, mammoths and fish, indicating when they were massed in large numbers and therefore easier to hunt.
Deciphering the markers pushes the date back 14,000 years to at least 20,000 years for the earliest known original. That suggests that writing was not a sudden invention necessitated by administration and bureaucracy in sophisticated societies, but something that was “far more deeply ingrained in human behaviour.” Ben Bacon spent years pondering dots and a distinctive Y symbol found on famous cave paintings at
