This is either true or I’m crazy, Bennett Bacon thought, as he crossed north London one evening in the spring of 2017. In his bag was a good bottle of bordeaux and a hardback volume on Ice Age art from the 1970s, feathered with Post-its.
Bacon has just turned 70 and works as a carver and gilder of fine furniture. In his free time, he likes to decode the mysterious symbols that constellate the walls of European palaeolithic art caves and that show up carved on bones. On that April evening, he believed he may have cracked some of the earliest written codes that exist. Marks that predated the accepted birth of writing by approximately 20,000 years. But he couldn’t be absolutely sure. He was hoping that, if his epiphany was “just another wacky theory”, as he put it to me last October, then Tony Freeth, a mathematician at University College London, might be good enough to tell him. And he’d heard that Freeth liked bordeaux.
Between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers, sheltering on the fringes of the frigid mammoth steppe that shrouded much of the European landmass, entered limestone cave networks, such as Altamira in northern Spain and Chauvet and Lascaux in southern France, carrying pigments. Yellow and red ochres, black manganese oxides, white kaolin clay. On the walls, they rendered images of the beasts that filled their world. Mammoths and bison in heart-thumping lifelikeness. Aurochs and horses. Reindeer and salmon.
Since the 19th century, archaeologists have been fighting over what the pictures might have meant. Initially, priests and gentleman scholars believed they might be a sort of magic for supercharging hunts. Later, some researchers believed they related to shamanic rituals; trances performed in the flickers of animal-grease lamplight. Others argue that whatever meaning there might have been will remain inaccessible to us for ever, holed up in the dark.
Whatever the answer — and these days archaeologists tend to think there is no single explanation — the tremendous resources the paintings required shows how central they were to Ice Age folk. Before they could grind and mix their pigments, people first had to mine or trade the minerals, then transport them, sometimes across huge distances. This was no home decor. The hunter-gatherers never inhabited the caves they adorned, choosing instead to camp out in the open air. Their works amounted to major public infrastructure and few modern-day humans have emerged from the caves into the sunlight indifferent.
Pablo Picasso was one of the bedazzled. After Altamira, the painter mourned in 1934, all is decadence. The first expert to examine the paintings at Lascaux was the archaeologist and priest Henri Breuil. In 1940, he christened the site “the Sistine Chapel of prehistory”. It was a fitting analogy. Archaeologists have since discovered that the artists built scaffolds to stretch up to the heights, like Michelangelo.
For his part, Bacon has little patience for rhapsodising over the cave paintings, or speculation about the dawn of art or the origin of man. He has never even once visited a cave site, preferring instead to study the images in books and online. That way “you don’t have to be in the dark”, he told me. “You don’t have to use their toilets.” And he has less time for the glorious painted animals than he does for the weird little geometric signs and symbols that swarm around them — squiggle-like markings on the walls and incised on bones that archaeologists have so far largely ignored as incidental scribbles, struggling to shift their gazes away from the grandeur of the beasts.
But to the people who made those marks, tens of thousands of years before the Sumerians invented alphabets around 3400BC, an invention most scholars understand to be the bridge between prehistory and history, the shapes were charged with meaning, representing concepts and ideas that were important to their lives. “These are not random doodles,” April Nowell, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada, told me. Yet, so far, nobody has been able to make much sense of any of them. At least, until Bacon came up with an intriguing new theory.
On a drizzly Saturday afternoon last autumn, I met Bacon in a public library in Crouch End in north London, where he lives. He was waiting for me by the entrance, a circumspect figure with a messenger bag full of cave-art books. Several months earlier, he had announced his theory in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and Paul Pettitt, a highly regarded palaeolithic archaeologist at Durham University, had joined him as a co-author. Other non-specialists were on the author list too, including Azi Khatiri, a former science journalist and James Palmer, a retired schoolteacher. The paper had attracted widespread media coverage — but also some backlash. Bacon was eager to talk me through it.
The son of a diplomat, Bacon grew up all over the world, with long stints of his childhood spent in Venezuela and Ecuador. He speaks quietly, with a soft North American accent, and studied English at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, but he now identifies as a Londoner. When I pushed for more information about his background, he resisted, saying he loathes defining people by their nationality. He added that he couldn’t understand why anybody would have the slightest interest in him, especially now that we have access to a rich and beautiful ancient culture whose written communications we can finally understand. “We are reaching into these people,” he said, unearthing “this world which we thought was inaccessible”.
Bacon’s achievement is the culmination of a lifetime’s fascination with the history of writing, which has interested him since before he can remember. Around 20 years ago, he began a self-directed inquiry into the deep history of signs and symbols. Hoping to uncover the origins of writing in the Stone Age, Bacon spent fruitless years studying the neolithic period, between 6,000 and 4,000 years before the present day. But after reading The First Signs, a 2016 book by Genevieve von Petzinger, a palaeoanthropologist from Canada, he was encouraged to go further back in time.
Von Petzinger was the first to try to catalogue palaeolithic symbols, showing that similar shapes crop up across huge distances. Having travelled to more than 100 cave art sites, she recorded a consistent inventory of 32 different recurring signs, including lines and dots, half circles, asterisks, zigzags, spirals and slanted, roof-like shapes, in a vast area spanning Spain in the west to Ukraine in the east. Her signary “is a treasure trove of data”, Silvia Ferrara, an expert on ancient writing systems at the University of Bologna, told me. Von Petzinger had refrained from attempting to decipher these symbols. Bacon decided he would take up the challenge.
Bacon’s weekdays are mostly spent in a carpentry and gilding workshop in Battersea, south London, a scene of bustling industry he compares to a palaeolithic art cave. There he makes richly detailed furniture. He helped restore Spencer House, one of London’s finest 18th-century palaces, and in 2018 he carved the wooden dragons that perch on the roof of the 18th-century pagoda in Kew Gardens. In the evenings and at weekends, he is in the British Library, trying to parse the meanings of graphic signs from the Stone Age, in sessions lasting many hours, a time commitment his family just about tolerate. “They don’t particularly like it,” he admitted.
Bacon sits in a venerable tradition of off-the-clock decipherers. “Most writing systems are done by outsiders,” he told me. In the 1870s, George Smith, an English banknote engraver born in a Chelsea slum, spent his lunch breaks in the British Museum Reading Room, translating ancient clay tablets that had recently arrived there from Iraq. On realising he was holding an early account of the biblical flood, contained in the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, he began running round the room shouting, removing items of his clothing in excitement.
Eighty years later, the English architect Michael Ventris decoded Linear B, a script from Bronze Age Greece. His breakthrough relied on the meticulous work of Alice Kober, who formulated grids of syllables in the 1940s. Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College in New York, but her life was devoted to cracking the Greek script at night in her Flatbush kitchen, in a house she shared with her mother. Her work went unappreciated for many years.
Bacon thinks his day job has helped him calibrate his attention to better focus on the complex work of code-breaking. “I work with really complicated things,” he said. His breakthrough, though, began as a bit of a hunch. Out of the 32 symbols in von Petzinger’s signary, Bacon began to focus on rows of lines and dots. “I saw animals with dots and lines, and I thought, an animal plus a number equals communication.” He began learning everything he could about animal-human relationships in the Ice Age. What if the numbers recorded important moments in the lives of the 30 or so species represented on the cave walls — seasonal migrations, or mating or birthing seasons?
It was a reasonable hypothesis. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were utterly dependent on animals. Keeping a schedule of key events in the lives of their prey would have helped their survival. The painters at Lascaux, which the great French archaeologist Norbert Aujoulat described as “a great calendar of creation”, had a keen awareness of seasonality, depicting scenes of rutting reindeers or herds crossing rivers during migrations. Perhaps the symbols, too, had something to do with these cyclical events?
Bacon assembled about 30 examples of pictures of animals with rows of lines or dots nearby. As he analysed them, he saw the data was fitting a pattern: the number of marks matched up with the number of months between the springtime melting of the snow and the mating seasons of each species. The idea was surprisingly simple and it seemed to work. “It’s not string theory,” Bacon told me. “It’s pictures of animals with dots.” But still, he knew he was becoming obsessed, and that he needed to confirm he wasn’t inventing patterns from the markings on the cave walls.
Bacon arrived at the west London home of Freeth, the UCL mathematician, that evening in 2017. Freeth is an expert in ancient calendars, and over the past couple of decades he had led the decipherment of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek mechanical astronomical calendar known as the world’s first computer, which was discovered in an Aegean shipwreck in 1901. “Tony is a ferocious brain,” said Bacon.
He hurriedly explained why he was there. “I have an idea which I personally think isn’t true,” Bacon told Freeth, taking care not to appear overconfident. “But I just want to spend five minutes with you, and if you tell me this is all nonsense, I’ll say thank you very much and I’ll go. That’s what I want to hear, because the chances I’ve done this are minuscule.”
Freeth made coffee and Bacon showed him some images. Hovering above the antlers of a reindeer was a line of seven red dots. Inside the body of a salmon, there were three. Beside a black outline of a mammoth, an artist had made a row of five straight lines.
Across Europe, Bacon explained, you tended to see four marks next to a painting of an auroch, an extinct kind of cattle. Three beside a fish. Next to a mammoth were almost always five marks. Bacon told Freeth that, according to his calculations, the vast majority of the marks corresponded to this pattern. For each animal, the number equated to the number of lunar months between the snowmelt and its mating, birthing or migration season. It looked as though the markings might form a lunar calendar for tracking the lives of animals — perhaps recording when they would be passing through or when they might be most vulnerable to attack.
The idea that Stone Age people may have marked time by keeping records of celestial events is not new. In the 1970s, Alexander Marshack, a journalist and amateur archaeologist in New York, suggested that Ice Age peoples may have recorded astronomical phenomena, such as the cycles of the Moon or the next eclipse, on portable objects such as cave-bear teeth or mammoth tusks. But he struggled to prove it.
In 2005, archaeologists unearthed 12 pits arranged in an arc in Warren Field in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The 10,000-year-old cavities appeared to be a lunisolar calendar. Each one represented a lunar month, and the pits were aligned with the winter solstice, allowing people to reconcile the lunar year with the solar year, which is around 11 days longer.
Freeth was fascinated by Bacon’s idea. “You might be on to something,” he said. But he added that Bacon would need a lot more data if he was going to prove anything. “So get to work on that, Freeth said, “and come and see me in six months.”
Bacon continued gathering images, building a data set of about 700 examples. The work would take him several years. Having refined his statistical calculations, he then wrote to other experts, including Pettitt, the Durham archaeologist, who lent his support to the idea. Freeth also joined as a co-author on the paper, which was finally published last year.
The authors argued that the markings around the animals formed part of a “proto-writing system”. They claimed that a Y symbol, often found near the animals, had the meaning “to give birth”. The team had, it seemed, done what nobody had done before: statistically demonstrate that people in the European Upper Palaeolithic period, broadly between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, used written markings for recording time.
Not everyone is convinced. According to Nowell at the University of Victoria, Bacon’s statistics prove only that there is some correlation between small numbers of lines and dots and representations of animals. Bacon has not, she told me emphatically, unearthed the meaning of any of those markings. In April, Nowell attacked Bacon’s theory in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Earlier this month, Bacon submitted a riposte.
Others have challenged his results on the basis that certain reproductions of images that Bacon used are not faithful to the originals on the cave walls. For von Petzinger, Bacon’s work is a promising start, but it’s weakened by the fact he has never entered an art cave. “Two-dimensional drawings and photos do not always tell the whole tale,” she told me. “I would love to take Ben into the field with me.” Other researchers feel we should be resigning ourselves to never understanding the meaning of the markings, and the meaning of palaeolithic art in general.
This sense of surrender follows a century in which a succession of researchers claimed to have understood the meanings of the paintings. Maybe they were connected with hunting magic, or had to do with shamanistic practices, or were they grand dioramas of creation? Each theory was fashionable for a time. But the notion that we can decode what was in the heads of Ice Age people has today become unfashionable among archaeologists and palaeontologists.
Bacon, though, is not an archaeologist nor a palaeontologist. He refuses to yield to this pushback. He stands by his argument, borne out in his statistical analysis, that each animal is associated with a number. He defended his desk-bound approach, noting that Yuri Knorozov, the Russian linguist who unlocked the meaning of the Mayan script, did so from Stalin’s Leningrad. The Soviet scholar never set foot in Mesoamerica. “Standing someplace is not understanding,” he said.
I wanted to ask Ferrara, the scholar of writing systems, what she thought of Bacon’s theory. If you are somebody with Ferrara’s level of expertise in cracking writing systems, you receive a lot of email. Hobbyists write in with crackpot solutions, claiming to have decoded mysterious systems such as Linear A or the rongorongo script of Easter Island. In her book The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Scripts, Ferrara even wrote up a list of 10 commandments for those interested in deciphering scripts to follow. The 10th? “Don’t get me involved.”
Bacon’s theory, she told me, hardly resembles the solutions that flood her inbox. His work “is not only tantalising”, Ferrara told me, “but quite persuasive”, with the firm caveat that validating the theory is difficult without a Rosetta Stone of sorts for confirming meanings. But whether true or not, Ferrara added, the very existence of these symbols shakes the notion that there was ever a clean break between prehistory and history. The traditional story, after all, is that people in the Stone Age existed in a perpetual present, with no way of recording information across time. Our snap into history is supposed to have occurred only in the context of administratively complex cities in Mesopotamia, around 5,500 years ago.
But what if there was no snap? Instead of a bureaucratic invention for managing urban life, writing might have crept into human societies at a glacial pace. Assuming Bacon is correct, writing was first a way to record something more ancient than cities — namely, the rhythms of nature. Writing may have first emerged as a way of doing phenology, the name for the study of the timings of biological life cycles.
For a long time phenology was a quaint hobby, but it’s becoming increasingly important these days. Thanks to data gathered by modern phenologists, citizen scientists who systematically record the timings of the biological events around them, we know that ecological time is a web of synchronicity. Bees hatch just as the plants are flowering. Migrant birds time their arrivals to meet the insects. The past 10,000 years or so since the Ice Age has been a period of relative climatic stability, which has allowed these cycles to remain robust year after year. But Ice Age artists, by contrast, may have used their symbols to keep track of animals’ lives at a time when the climate was wildly lurching around.
Now we are entering a more unstable period once again. And phenological data, fielded by organisations such as the Woodland Trust in the UK and the US National Phenology Network, tells us that climatic fluctuations caused by carbon emissions are bending periodic cycles into a busted rim. This means a litany of fumbled unions. The insects aren’t yet out for the arriving migrant birds. Butterflies miss the wildflowers. Stillness greets the swallow.
Meanwhile, Bacon is busy working on decoding more signs, insisting we can have meaningful connections with people across a valley of tens of thousands of years. Writing is a kind of remedy for missed encounters, and the symbols of the Ice Age, Bacon thinks, are there to be read and understood.
“We can get into their heads,” he told me. While we may never fully decode their writing system, perhaps never grasping the entirety of what the hunter-gatherers were intending to communicate, “that’s also what they said about Egyptian hieroglyphs”, he added. “They said that about Linear B. That’s what they said about the Phoenicians.” Bacon could be mistaken, no doubt. The meanings of the symbols may be lost for ever. But if they’re gone, a firmer truth still stands: Homo sapiens, even in the most far-flung past, kept codes. Which means we were always at least in some sense creatures who read.
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