Researchers say a trove of markings carved into Stone Age tools and figurines found in southwestern Germany carries a statistical signature on par with the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets, indicating that humans may have devised a symbolic recording system more than 40,000 years ago, according to Scientific American. The analysis, published in PNAS, examined more than 3,000 individual signs on 260 objects. It found that the diversity and repetition of these marks match the information density seen in the first administrative tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, which date to the fourth and third millennia BCE.. The results suggest that Ice Age hunter-gatherers organized and transmitted information with repeated crosses, lines, notches, and dots that were more than decoration.
The artifacts, many of them unearthed in caves across the Swabian Jura, include an ivory mammoth figurine incised with rows of crosses and dots and a mammoth ivory plate depicting a hybrid lion-human figure marked with dots and notches, The Independent reported. Another human-lion hybrid figurine from Hohlenstein-Stadel bears regularly spaced notches along one arm that the study interprets as intentional placement.
The research team led by linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin digitized the signs and compared measurable features such as sign diversity and repetition to later symbol systems, including proto-cuneiform and modern scripts. Their goal was not to decipher meaning but to quantify structure: the way signs recur, how often they repeat, and how information is distributed across different object types.
The computational analysis showed that figurines carry more information-dense sign sequences than tools, and that certain marks cluster by object category. Crosslike signs appear on figurines rather than on tools, while dots do not appear on tools at all. “The organization [of the markings] points to the transmission of more complex ideas,” said paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, who was not involved in the work. The team emphasizes that the sequences differ sharply from modern writing that represents speech: the Stone Age marks frequently repeat the same signs in runs - “cross, cross, cross, line, line, line” - a property not typical of spoken language encoding. Yet when benchmarked against protocuneiform tablets, which themselves feature repetitive sign usage in early administrative lists and tallies, the Stone Age sequences showed comparable information density and complexity, a result that surprised the study authors.
Bentz and Dutkiewicz frame these findings as a window into how early Homo sapiens recorded thoughts and coordinated social life long before phonetic writing emerged. “Our research is helping us uncover the unique statistical properties - or statistical fingerprint - of these sign systems, which are an early predecessor to writing,” Professor Bentz said. The objects examined span roughly 34,000 to 45,000 years ago, a period when Homo sapiens settled in Europe and encountered Neanderthals, and similar sign sequences appear on “countless tools and sculptures” across the Paleolithic, Dutkiewicz said. The team has been traveling to museums and archaeological sites to expand the database and apply the same statistical framework to additional finds. “There are many sign sequences to be found on artefacts. We've only just scratched the surface,” Dutkiewicz said.
Despite the structural parallels to protocuneiform, the researchers caution that the Ice Age markings are not akin to later scripts that encode speech, and they do not attempt to read the signs. Still, the convergence in information density implies a shared functional niche: compressing and transmitting practical knowledge through standardized marks. Bentz said the comparison upended his expectations about the relative similarity of ancient systems: the team initially thought early protocuneiform would align more closely with modern writing because of its temporal proximity, but their metrics pointed instead to a tight link with much older Paleolithic sequences. The work also highlights how different object classes may have served distinct communicative purposes, with the more information-rich figurines potentially carrying layered symbolic content while tools bore sparser, task-related marks.
Independent experts note the interpretive limits but welcome the methodological shift. Von Petzinger called the challenge of parsing such ancient markings “practically impossible” in terms of specific meanings, but said that focusing on intentionality, repetition, and patterning are “excellent approaches” to establish that the marks were more than decorative. The study’s authors argue that finding statistically organized signs at this time depth reframes questions about why early humans made art and how symbolism functioned in Ice Age societies. While a phonetic writing system that represents spoken language appears only about 5,000 years ago and carries very different statistical traits, the Stone Age symbol sequences suggest a deep lineage for information encoding in human material culture. Bentz said the resemblance to protocuneiform in both repetition rates and complexity held up as he rechecked the dataset: “I couldn’t believe it. I went through the data again and again,” he said.