The Ancients - The First Writing

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

The results of a groundbreaking new study were released today [January 5th] by a group of researchers who believe they have conclusively decoded the earliest known form of proto-writing. Dating back to the Palaeolithic era, this combination of abstract markings and ice age art decorates over 600 locations across Europe and have long fascinated archaeologists and enthusiasts alike.In today's episode Tristan is joined by one of the team behind this marvel, Professor Paul Pettitt from the University of Durham. Paul talks Tristan through the team's hard work and perseverance of this mammoth task - and helps shine a light on what this study means for our understanding of Ice Age cultures.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and welcome back. It's 2023. I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year. And on the ancients, we like to kick off the new year with a bang,

with an absolute cork of an episode. And I'm pleased to say that I don't think we're going to disappoint you today because we're talking all about the first writing. And today, the 5th of January, it's a big day for this topic because the results of a new study have just been published, have just been released. This is groundbreaking, breaking news. It's the announcement that this group of incredible researchers, they think that they've deduced the earliest known form of writing, proto-writing of modern humans, of Homo sapiens, dating back more than 10,000 years ago, deep into the Ice Age, into the Paleolithic, the time of hunter-gatherers.

We're going to be talking about these abstract marks that have been found alongside many incredible depictions of ancient animals, of cave art. Think of places like the incredible Lascaux Cave, Chauvet, Altamira, etc, etc. Well, alongside many of these depictions of Paleolithic, of Ice Age animals, largely of prey, they found these abstract markings. And for a long time, people have been trying to deduce what these markings meant. Well now this team, they think they've done it. They think they've figured out this very, very, the earliest form of writing that we currently know about. To explain more about it, what this writing is, whether we can call it actual writing or we should refer to it as proto-writing,

this early form of writing. To explain all about that and why this new study is so significant, why it's so exciting, I was delighted to interview Professor Paul Pettit from the University of Durham. You're going to absolutely love it. As mentioned, it's a corker of an episode. It's a groundbreaking new announcement in the ancient history, in the archaeology, in the anthropology and ancient art world. And we've got it right here on The Ancients for you today. So without further ado, to talk all about it, the first writing, here's Paul. Paul, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Delighted to be on. Thank you for inviting me.

You are more than welcome, especially for this topic, Paul. This is super exciting because it's just been announced. This new breakthrough, hot off the press, what seems to be, can we say, potentially the oldest known writing from Homo sapiens? can we say potentially the oldest known writing from homo sapiens yes absolutely there will be some questions about the specific use of the term writing or as we call it proto writing but yes really it's the first detailed communication that we've been able to identify from the ice age that is so so interesting well you Ice Age there, so let's set the scene. How far back into prehistory are we going? What period of prehistory are we talking about here, Paul? Well, as us archaeologists call it, we're dealing with the Upper Paleolithic

in Europe. And to put dates on it, that's anywhere between about 12,000 years ago, the end of the Pleistocene and the first appearance of Homo sapiens in Europe somewhere around or before 40,000 years ago. Right so this is a huge period in prehistory nonetheless and when looking at arts and famous famous arts such as Lascaux, Chauvet and so on and so forth there also seems to be at this time there's's this big, dare I say, advancement or shift in the style of Upper Paleolithic art. Now, what is this great shift? Yes, well, the earliest art we have, whether it be in caves or on portable objects,

whilst figurative from around 37,000 years ago, really only takes on the kind of iconic characteristics of Paleolithic or Ice Age art from around 20,000 perhaps 25,000 years ago that is to say lots of depictions of animals all those herd animals like bison reindeer red deer that were so critical for hunting for survival that are depicted in highly naturalistic form. So when we think, as you say, of Chauvet or Lascaux, Altamira, Neo and so on, really these are epitomising what we would call the late upper Paleolithic, say between 20 and 12,000 years ago. But that earlier period is far more murkier. It's not quite as sophisticated as that great big floroid from 20,000 years ago. I mean, Paul, those sites

that you mentioned there are absolutely incredible. But just describe in a bit of detail what someone would see if you walked into a place like Lascaux or Chauvet what sorts of colour like the vibrant nature of it you would witness upon walking into this ice age setting well Lascaux's the classic one it's a relatively simple cave perhaps about 300 meters in length and it has a series of galleries these These are relatively large spaces, let's say about the size of three standard living rooms and a little higher. And artistic panels comprised of dozens of images of these animals belong are clustered in these particular galleries. So if you walked into Lascaux, after a little drop down into the cave, the ceiling would heighten and you'd find yourself as Robo the dog did in 1940 and his owner who crawled in to rescue him.

You would find yourself in the so-called Hall of the Bulls. big scene a stampede of wild cattle of aurochs would literally be swirling around your head accompanied by wild horses red deer stags as well it's a big lively scene of these animals in their rutting behavior mating competing fighting and if you moved around that chamber you'd stamp your feet and they would echo, rather like the hooves of those stampeding animals above your head. And the other main chambers of Lascaux repeat and vary upon this theme. It's a great celebration in multiple colours of the creation of the mating habits of these major animals. colours of the creation of the mating habits of these major animals. These are paintings literally produced with brushes and leather pads with a wet paint. They're drawings as well using

dry pigments, reds, blacks, biscuity ochre colours and they're engraved as well so in some cases difficult to see perhaps the function of some of this art was not to be seen rather like we go to a museum but the act of creation could have been important so a mysterious dark place with pools of light throwing up these beautiful images it is certainly pulled one of the great wonders of the Paleolithic, isn't it? It kind of feels like Pompeii in the fact that you have to visit Pompeii. You see incredible pictures of it, but to really appreciate it, you have to be there. I've never been to Lascaux, but I'm sure that you have. And it must be quite an unparalleled feeling to walk through that Ice Age system. Absolutely. absolutely i have and it is although to

get a plug in for lasco 4 which is as the name implies that the third reconstruction it is remarkable the visitor center there so you can get an impression there but the important point is i think with caves and cave art is that they are the only surviving three-dimensional environments left of the Paleolithic you know we're used to our levels of stone tools and abandoned animal bones and so on which are very two-dimensional so here we can walk quite literally on the surfaces our Ice Age forebears were walking on and we can experience the art exactly as they did you mentioned it earlier but i feel it's something that we want to mention again because it's important to our discussion and the work of you and your colleagues right now the depictions of

these animals they seem to largely be of prey animals they are almost entirely actually so of course we're dealing with ice age hunter gatherers entirely dependent on the hunting of wild animals and the gathering of wild plant matter where they exist so really animals on the hoof those great lawn mowers of the earthy step grasslands were so critical. So it's no surprise that these animals were good to think with, to think about and therefore depict for whatever reason they're doing it. So really it's a celebration and probably a deeper meditation on these critical animals. So yes, reindeer, red deer, mammoth elsewhere,

not so much in Lascaux, but those animals that were repeatedly being hunted and which were known, the behaviour of which was known intimately to these people. Right, Paul, well, let's keep going then. Talk to me, this seems to be very much the meat of this interview, talk to me about the abstract marks that have been found alongside these images. Yes, and it is all about meat, you're right to use that term. So obviously we've focused on the wonderful images of the animals now, but what we rather boringly call non-figurative signs

often accompany these images of animals. And by these, these their markings which may be rows of lines or rows of simple dots either produced with a pigment or engraved and sometimes other signs that to use our modern language we might call y signs like the letter y or x's and this kind of thing. Now we can tell that these were associated with depictions of animals and it's no surprise that we understand that they were probably saying something about these animals in no different a way say to earlier Sumerian cuneiform or pictographic writing where a sheep is depicted with three dots and that means i owe you three sheep and i'll give you them later tristan you know that kind of thing but up until now we've simply not been able to understand what in fact these markings these non-figurative signs are saying about these animals. So we know it was an information system, whatever we call it, we just couldn't read it.

And that's really what introduces our new publication. I mean, that's so interesting, Paul. So it was never thought from researchers or academics before this study of you and your colleagues that these abstract markings, they may not be, let let's say blood splatters or something like that you there was always this feeling this gut feeling that they had something to do with a system as you hinted at just there yes that's right there have been interpretations that these were figuring something so if you have an arc of dots coming out of an animal's mouth as you say it could be blood spattering out of it and so on it never seemed to sit particularly well because the images of the animals are so naturalistic and often

there's a beautiful concern with detail so why then would you not depict blood spattering in a you know in a graphic manner so that was always rather odd so because also there is a very restricted number of these one might say a redundancy, you know, you don't just get any variable number of dots, lines or whatever associated with these animals. It's always a very specific number. And that indicates or that really suggests that there's some meaning to the number of these marks, that they're not just random to depict something. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast American History Hit.

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the United States and beyond to bring American history to life. Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. all right we'll take it away what your hypothesis, you and your colleagues' hypothesis about what these marks therefore do indicate? Absolutely. Well, I have to say I would never have had a clue about this were it not for this labour intensive pioneer work of Ben, our lead author, Ben Bacon, who has spent years gestating on this and constructing a huge database. So the idea is that these are representing, in quite some detail, major events in the annual lifetime of these animals. So if you imagine you're out on the grasslands, on the ste the steps of Europe as a hunter-gatherer, you need to know where these animals critical to survival are going to be at certain points of the landscape. We know these people were highly mobile. How do you know that you have to be in London at a certain time to get all the wild horses and then up in Durham at another time of year to get

the red deer for example. So Ben hypothesised that the number of marks associated with a particular animal, a reindeer, a red deer, whatever, were reflecting in some way major events and birth reflecting in some way major events and birth and mating are of course those two events you know you'll get a lot of these animals together at the same time so he hypothesized that they were representing when those animals mate and give birth in a general region but the thing is that has no meaning unless you can link it to a fixed point in the landscape if i say to you mammoth we know are mating at four or in four months what does that mean so it's only meaningful relevant to a fixed point so i think ben's real critical breakthrough discovery was that there is a fixed point in the landscape for hunter-gatherers. They're not agriculturalists.

We're used to this. We observe the sun. That gives us our annual calendar. And within that, we can divide up months by the phases of the moon. But hunter-gatherers have no use for this they're not sun oriented if you like so whilst they certainly would be aware of the monthly lunar cycles 13 of which there are of course in a typical year they need something else to begin the year with if you like begin their observations with and Ben's innovation was that

the one fixed point everybody can recognize is the beginning of spring that is to say you're in a snowy ice age step environment everything's white rivers are frozen over. And then you have that point where the rivers start melting, greenery starts appearing. And he uses the French term for this. There is a term, a zoo archaeological term, the Bon Saison. So it makes real sense that you have that fixed point. And then this is what the markings represent. And then this is what the markings represent, the number of months after the beginning of the Bon Saison that these animals mate and give birth in. So Ben Hood observed you never get more than 13 of these marks, which is perfect.

That really adds reinforcement to the notion it's a lunar calendar. And also that typically the number of marks is in the order of one to five so to convert that if you arbitrarily say bon saison is the first of may then it's giving us an indication of events that occur in june july august september that kind of area so we were able to test this. So obviously it was quite an easy task to take all of that data, several hundred sets of markings and associated animals, divide them up by animals. So in this case, one depiction of a red deer is depicting the concept of red deer, not an individual red deer, and then summarise the number of marks associated with the red deer, and then do the same for mammoth, the same for

bison, and so on. So what we were then able to do is to compare that to the months in which we know modern equivalents of those animals are mating, are migrating and are giving birth. And the fit is absolutely beautiful. We can show that the number of marks in a sequence of lines or dots associated with a particular animal tells us exactly when that species is mating. that species is mating. And the Y sign, and this is the critical thing, it looks like a modern Y in our alphabet, it's one line with a second line diverging from it, and Ben hypothesized that that means giving birth. One becomes two, one line becomes two, or perhaps two legs opened in the act of birth but anyway the position in those sequences of lines of the y we were able to show again using modern

ethological analogies is an excellent predictor of when those animals are giving birth so a sequence of lines with a y at one position somewhere within that will tell you when that animal is mating and when that animal is giving birth in a particular region that's the discovery and it stands up statistically as well that's absolutely fascinating and i hope you don't mind if we delve a bit more into it because I could go through so many different angles rabbit holes here but Paul you mentioned some 700 examples in this database could you give us a few particular examples from this database like whereabouts in the world are we talking as in when you were looking at examples where you had depictions of this animal prey art but also these markings right next to them absolutely so it's european upper paleolithic and overwhelmingly the data is from central and particularly western europe

france spain but without liars in germany czech republic and so on ultimately we can trace this over to as far east as the russian plain for sure that is something that we need to do further so for now there's over 700 examples from the caves and from the portable arts of Western Europe and some to some degree Central Europe as well, although these examples do go back to the earliest upper Paleolithic, you know, certainly to 37,000, 38,000, almost all of our examples are within the period from about 22,000, 23,000 to 12,000. We've deliberately focused on that because the greater amount of examples are from that. and also because we were initially skeptical that we would expect a system like this to last for i mean that's long enough 10 000 years

but to last even longer but it does seem that this very simple very generic system that doesn't require a sophisticated language doesn't require one person to understand another to make sense of this. You know, it does seem to have persisted an extremely long time. That's so interesting in itself. So, Paul, in regards to this potential language writing system, sometimes you think of writing in ancient history and you think only the elites would have been able to understand it, or only the people who received such an education could understand the writing and could read and so on

and so forth do you think it must be such an impossible question to ask but this these use of markings was used for so many people in the hunter-gatherer society where people had to embrace so many different roles to survive would have been universally understood for this vital part of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to understand the movements the activities of their prey yes this is most certainly vital for surviving it's probably the ability that gave homo sapiens an edge with hindsight over say the neanderthals and perhaps the denisovans it's certainly critical but it's a fascinating question as to how many individuals knew that or was it a secret information as small-scale societies tend to have their aggrandizers and secret societies

and this kind of thing so it could be individuals among whom this spreads. I think the interesting thing with what we've identified is that it is very simple, doesn't require any particularly specialist knowledge. And indeed, Ben was able to decipher it in the modern world. So in theory, it could have been helped by everyone. theory it could have been helped by everyone and the cuneiform specialist Irving Finkel has made a very good point on these tokens you have in Neolithic and Bronze Age Near East that ultimately may have developed into Sumerian cuneiform he said you know basically if you've got simple tokens that's your way of telling an illiterate shepherd that they need to give the temple three sheep you know at this time of year and so on so it could well be that pretty much anyone in ice age

society were able to share this information were able to read off this information if you like and therefore improve the chances of survival. And in the examples that you and your colleagues including Ben this huge database of examples I'm presuming did you see examples of similarities let's say a depiction of a deer somewhere with markings next to it you had the same number of markings next to a deer found in a different location in western europe too exactly that's right there is always a very restricted pattern so for example with horses whilst there's variation you typically get one line followed by a y so it's a sequence of two marks the second of which is a y which showed they mate in may or June and give birth in June or July, that kind of thing. So, yeah, that was the real surprising thing.

It had to mean something because otherwise one would expect a really random set. And my colleague at Durham with whom I work, Bob Kentridge, was able to do some stats in this. And it showed overwhelmingly that these were terrific predictors of birthing and mating for these animals and the chances of it arising naturally were infinitesimally small well that was going to be my next question therefore with your conclusions this whole meteorological calendar this lunar calendar pre-agricultural calendar which is fascinating in itself i have to talk about that a bit more but the marks do you think they would have been very reliable or reliable to quite a good extent for these moving hunter-gatherer societies yes i think so one thing we can tell using other

categories of data is that things often quite sophisticated things, are travelling around the landscape over hundreds of kilometres. So for example, specific very fine quality stones are moved around or artefacts napped on them. Pigments we can source geologically, we know they're being transported or exchanged over distance. So art themes as well we find over long distances. So it's no surprise that something like this simple system should have a very widespread distribution, a widespread currency, certainly. So I imagine it was relatively easy to communicate what this meant. This is how to read these images.

This is a horse and look in this area Brighton they mate in this month relative to the greening of the land and in this month around Brighton they give birth you know. And Sachi what sorts when we think ice age we think of megafauna such as mammoths alongside horses and aurochs and the like. In regards to the amount of abstract marks alongside these prey animals do we see quite a focus on on those big megafauna such as mammoths or is it a variety of fauna that they would have hunted? It's a variety and we group them together so we have horse, mammoths, So we have horse, mammoths, bison, wild cattle, aurochs in other words, cervids, which could include red deer or reindeer, and caprids, which in the montane areas, ibex, chamois, this kind of thing.

And fish as well, which are a little different, fish and birds, as they kind of appear and disappear. They're migratory, of course. So although our data really stacked up with their behaviour, we're not dealing so much as an observable mating and birthing period. So those are the main categories, and those indeed are the main animals which are hunted. I mean, it is all absolutely fascinating.

Before I completely wrap up and ask you the all-important question is it writing giving you a bit of hint where we're going here Paul I mean last thing for me there's no such thing as a silly question I'd like to go back to your mentioning of how you never see more than 13 marks now from looking at that how were you and the team therefore able to conclude that this type of calendar that it would have been would have been a lunar a meteorological calendar firstly there's not many possibilities available as a way of dividing up the annual year in a repetitive fashion so the moon is by far and away the most obvious and in fact since the 1960s paleolithic archaeologists have speculated as to some sequences of marks reflecting a lunar calendar. Ironically, not so convincing these days.

But anyway, that's always the obvious candidate for a society who doesn't need to sow crops and watch them mature and reap them at a certain time that can use the sun and so on. So it was always the lunar calendars to lose, as it were. So the fact that we know that there's 13 lunar phases to the year really added impetus to the project when we saw that really 13 is the maximum and usually a lot less. But that's when Tony Freeth of University College London became involved. Tony has been instrumental in the understanding of the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, so knows everything there is to know about meteorological phenomena, calendars and this kind of thing.

And his knowledge in particular has been crucial to bring that to bear. Well, there you go. Well, time is running out. I'm sure I could ask so many more questions, but the last, last big one, therefore, you have these abstract marks, which definitely seem to indicate, you know, to help hunter-gatherer societies with hunting prey,

marking out when the birthing and the mating seasons were for their prey. Can we call it writing? I don't think we can call it writing per se in the sense say of sumerian cuneiform because as far as we can tell it's very restricted and it wasn't used to represent words so it was used to represent concepts but it couldn't independently be used to construct words. We've called it proto-writing because it does behave or it does look very similar to the Sumerian precursor to cuneiform writing, a pictographic writing. In other words, as I said earlier, you know, the image of a resource and a numerical association with that. In that sense, we're certainly justified calling

it proto-writing, but I don't think I'd drop the proto just yet, not least of which I'd be shot by writing specialists, I'm sure. But I hope you'll agree that, you know, proto-writing is some achievement. We need some precursor for later writing to form out of if you like absolutely well that still i think it lets us put the title as the first writing for this interview episode today paul but that so thank you very much for that it is an incredible breakthrough by you and your colleagues and it's such a privilege to be able to interview about it you know right when this is being released to the world i mean just before we completely wrap up paul is there anything else that you'd like to add about the process about you and your colleagues about this whole breakthrough

and its significance well for me yes first the critical importance of amateur to use the term in its nicest sense input into archaeology Ben and our co-authors Azzy and James and of course using perspectives from different people and Bob Kentridge our visual psychologist at Durham with whom I work so that collaboration multidisciplinary, and above all, Ben working all those evenings at this as well. You know, that's the great fun of archaeology. Well, Paul, absolutely. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast this morning. It's a great pleasure. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Professor Paul Petit from Durham University, who was very much involved in this groundbreaking research.

There he was talking you through this recent announcement in the ancient history world and why it's so exciting. The first writing that we know of at the moment from Homo sapiens who knows what will be found in future years i really do hope you enjoyed the episode and may i just say welcome back here's to 2023 it's going to be an absolute belter of a year i could talk for hours about the topics that we're going to be covering but i will leave for you to find out in due course. Now, last thing from me, I said it in 2022, and I'll say it again as we kickstart 2023. If you're enjoying the Ancients podcast

and you want to help us out, you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from, because it's easy and it really helps us. We love seeing the feedback and it helps us with our main overarching mission

which is to share these incredible stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible and also to share with you this incredible expertise from these scholars, from these academics, from these authors who have dedicated so many years of their lives to researching particular aspects of our ancient history that they find extremely fascinating. That's enough rambling on from me. You've got much more to do than listen to me all day, so I will see you in the next episode. Thank you.