“They didn’t do it for fun.” The multiple repetitions of the P-shaped claviform sign in France’s Niaux cave “can’t be a coincidence”, he argues. “Of course they mean something,” says French prehistorian Jean Clottes. This, if nothing else, suggests that the markings had some sort of significance.
For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors seem to have been curiously consistent with the symbols they used. Perhaps the most startling finding was how few signs there were – just 32 in all of Europe. “Our ability to represent a concept with an abstract symbol is uniquely human“ Elsewhere, they were on their own, like the row of bell shapes found in El Castillo in northern Spain (see picture below), or the panel of 15 penniforms in Santian, also in Spain.Īt El Castillo in Spain, a black penniform and bell-shapes In some places, the signs were part of bigger paintings. The symbols she found ranged from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms. After 2 hours sliding through mud inside the mountain, she found two dots painted in pinkish ochre.īetween 20, von Petzinger visited 52 caves in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. “Thank God I’m not claustrophobic,” she says. Eventually, she noticed a tiny opening at knee level, trickling with water. At first, von Petzinger couldn’t even find the entrance. At El Portillo in northern Spain, all she had to go on was a note an archaeologist made in 1979 of some “red signs” no one had been back since.
#Ancient space symbols full#
For the full set of symbols, von Petzinger also had to visit many obscure caves, the ones without big, flashy paintings. Many are privately owned and sometimes jealously guarded by archaeologists. Gaining access to caves in France, where a lot of Stone Age art is located, can be devilishly complicated. For years, von Petzinger has wondered if the circles, triangles and squiggles that humans began leaving on cave walls 40,000 years ago represent that special time in our history – the creation of the first human code. There must have been an earlier time when people first started playing with simple abstract signs. But it and other systems like it – such as Egyptian hieroglyphs – are complex and didn’t emerge from a vacuum. The first formal writing system that we know of is the 5000-year-old cuneiform script of the ancient city of Uruk in what is now Iraq. Her work has convinced her that far from being random doodles, the simple shapes represent a fundamental shift in our ancestors’ mental skills. Her interest lies not in the breathtaking paintings of bulls, horses and bison that usually spring to mind, but in the smaller, geometric symbols frequently found alongside them. Von Petzinger, a palaeoanthropologist from the University of Victoria in Canada, is spearheading an unusual study of cave art. On the reverse were three etched symbols: a line, an X and another line. It was only when she flipped one over that the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. The dozens of ancient deer teeth laid out before her, each one pierced like a bead, looked roughly the same. When she first saw the necklace, Genevieve von Petzinger feared the trip halfway around the globe to the French village of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac had been in vain. Spot the signs: geometric forms can be found in paintings, as at Marsoulas in France
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