Iron Age Britain: Cannibalism evidence discussed by expert
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An amateur archaeologist has unravelled the meaning behind the oldest Stone Age writing system that hunter-gatherers are thought to have used to keep information about their prey. Ben Bacon, a 67-year-old from London, is an amateur archaeology enthusiast who, out of pure fascination, spent countless evenings looking through pictures of cave paintings of mammoths and other prehistoric animals.
While he does not have any professional qualifications, experts have backed up his analysis of the 25,000-years-old paintings, which suggests that the markings on them related to animal life-cycles that hunter-gathers recorded.
After making the discovery, Mr Bacon teamed up with professors from two universities to write their paper, which was published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Mr Bacon, along with the professors from Durham University and University College London, have determined that the so-called “proto-writing” system found in over 600 Ice Age images across Europe pre-dates others that were believed to have surfaced during the Near Eastern Neolithic by at least 10,000 years.
The marks, which appear as a sequences of dots, shapes and other markings, have unveiled a record of information and references to a calendar, as opposed to recorded speech.
These symbols were used across Europe until the end of the Ice Age, around 11,000 years ago. It it believed that they could date back up to 40,000 years. The second oldest system did not appear until around 5,500 years ago, in Mesopotamia.
The team discovered that the number of marks on the older system was a record, by lunar month, of the period that animals were breeding. Three symbols, made up of lines, dots and a “Y” shape reportedly indicated this.
They used the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a reference point to confirm this. The team then worked out that the year begins with spring and dots and lines stand for lunar months.
A picture of a mammoth with five marks revealed that the mammoth breeding season happens five lunar months after the beginning of spring, while the Y shape indicated the time of year a species gives birth.
According to Professor Paul Pettitt from the University of Durham, it would have been useful to understand when the breeding season is as large groups of animals often gather together.
He said: “The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar.”
Mr Bacon was enthusiastic about the breakthrough discovery, which he believes will lead to fresh insights about the period.
He said: “The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them, using a similar approach that others took to understanding an early form of Greek text.
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“Using information and imagery of cave art available via the British Library and on the internet, I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns. I reached out to friends and senior university academics, whose expertise was critical to proving my theory.
“It was surreal to sit in the British Library and slowly work out what people 20,000 years ago were saying but the hours of hard work were certainly worth it.”
Prof Robert Kentridge, also from Durham University, has previously worked with Prof Pettitt to develop the field of so-called visual palaeopsychology. This is the scientific investigation of the psychology behind the earliest development of human visual culture.
Prof Kentridge said: “The implications are that Ice Age hunter-gatherers didn’t simply live in their present, but recorded memories of the time when past events had occurred and used these to anticipate when similar events would occur in the future, an ability that memory researchers call mental time-travel.”
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