Imagine being an amateur independent researcher, and proposing something that you think will just be treated normally. To the levels of, “interesting research, let’s publish it and call it a day.”
Apparently, that was not written in the stars for researcher and furniture conservator Ben Bacon. He just happened to notice markings while looking at images of European cave art. After seeing them, he suggested that the earliest writing in human history could be these said carvings on the wall.
But why is this suggestion shocking? It’s because if this is in fact true, Bacon could be rewriting our history. European caves were made roughly 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, which could push the timeline of written language to that date (so written history would be moved back to around tens of thousands of years).
“I think that the cave paintings fascinate us all because of their beauty and visceral immediacy,” Bacon told Motherboard in an email. “I was idly looking at Palaeolithic paintings one night on the Web and noticed, purely by chance, that a large number of animals had what I took to be numbers associated with them.”
He is now working with archaeologists from Durham University and the University College London to see if the markings can be decoded and if they form a calendar system that tracked the lives of animals in the paintings.
Image credit: Bacon et.al via Vice