Mysterious ancient code on cave walls was solved by amateur
The mysterious code found on cave walls will pave the way to an amazing set of discoveries archaeologists believe, all thanks to the work of an amateur.
Researchers have suspected for decades that these ancient dots and stripes have always contained some hidden meaning or message, yet they lacked the ability to decipher them until now.
It is thought that according to these ancient writings, that the humans who wrote them were using them to track movements of wild animals like horses and mammoths, and record their mating habits.
This provides evidence that these ancient hunters, presumably from the ice Age, had devised a primitive form of proto- writing to document events in their lives.
This new finding now makes the writing even more ancient, clocking in at least 20,000 years ago. The precious finding of the earliest cases of the writing were around 14,000 years after that.
Academics claim that such cases of writing were not early cases of the need for administration or bureaucracy, but more of a deep rooted human behavioural trait.
The code is a record of lunar months of animal mating patterns
Ben Bacon is the archaeological enthusiast who discovered the recent, and has been spending the last few years researching over 600 sites where these writings can be found.
When he finally thought he had cracked the riddle, he consulted a number of other academics who confirmed and verified his theory. Paul Pettitt an archaeologist at Durham University said:
“It’s really great vindication that amateurs can still play a very critical role in understanding archaeology in whatever period. A lesson for us all academics.”
To crack the code, Bacon worked together with an honorary professor of the University College London, Tony Freeth, who had previously headed up research on the Greek Antikythera mechanism, an ancient astronomical clock in order to decipher it.
“Lunar calendars are different because there are just under twelve and a half lunar months in a year, so they do not fit neatly into a year. As a result, our own modern calendar has all but lost any link to actual lunar months,” said he.
Together they had to reconstruct a calendar which was based on meteorology, that the ancient ice Age humans would have had available in order to explain the universality of the cave writings.
They were then able to cross reference the birth cycles of the equivalent types of animals that were around at that time which are still alive today, which led them to the conclusion that the dots and animal drawings were a record of lunar months of their mating patterns.
For example paintings of aurochs, which were ancient cattle from Spain were shown with four dots, showing that they mated four months after the Paleolithic Spring. The findings were almost no chance of then being coincidental in any way.
Such documented dots are evidence that they were just more than a simple hunting tally of kills, and assume that the consciousness level of ancient humans was much higher than originally thought.
It’s a fundamentally different thing to a tally, if it is saying this animal species will mate four lunar cycles after our agreed starting point. And that really is a totally different league of thought. It’s not just record keeping, it’s a real conceptualisation of time.
The study should help to change people’s stereotypical view about ancient cavemen being very simple and basic, and more clever at all lacking intelligence.
These findings are only the beginning however, as many more studies of similar nature are bound to emerge from other academic sources. They were already close to releasing other findings regarding another symbol related to human beings, and much more was to come.
Source: Heritage Daily, UCL
