“Symbolic precursors to writing” — a system of conventional signs — from the Paleolithic?
« previous post | next post »
Below is a guest post by Richard Sproat and Rafael Núñez. It summarizes a recently published paper by d’Errico, Santos da Rosa, Courtenay, Núñez, Liu, Sproat, & Blasi, "Inferring Conventional Sign Systems from Paleolithic Engravings: Methodological and Theoretical Challenges".
Back in February, Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz (henceforth BD) published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that presented their study of markings on Paleolithic artifacts, mostly in bone, antler and ivory, from the Swabian Aurignacian (43,000–34,000 BP). Their conclusion, based on various statistical analyses, including entropic measures, and a couple of sign repetition rate measures, was that these marks constituted a structured system of deliberate and conventional signs. By translating the engravings into 1D sequences of standardized characters, they reported strong statistical overlap with early Mesopotamian protocuneiform (Uruk V) and clear divergence from later systems as well as modern writing systems.
Predictably, the paper attracted a lot of attention, especially from the popular science press, ever eager for a story that “rewrites history as we know it”. Coverage included CNN, Science Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, among many others. To their credit, and unlike some other recent work (e.g. Bacon et al. 2023), BD did not emphasize guesses as to the meanings of the marks. Also, they were relatively careful in their article to avoid making strong claims about these markings being “protowriting”, much less “writing”. The authors, however, were subtle, but explicit, in stressing pretentious and sensational claims. For instance, in the conclusions they stated that the reported “statistical fingerprint” was “very similar” to the “earliest numeric and numero-ideographic protocuneiform tablets stemming from the Uruk V period”, deliberately establishing a link to sophisticated higher-order cognition — numerical cognition and notation. (In a related article that they cite, the 2nd author explicitly claimed that the star artifact in DB's Figure 1A (so-called "Adorant") “constitute[s] deliberate numerical representations” — Dutkiewicz, 2023.)
Such an evoked representational “numerical” interpretative framework, although flashy, ignores basic issues regarding the conventionalization of symbolic-reference subserving the origin of numerical cognition (Núñez, 2017), and obviously, the crucial fact that numerical practices in Uruk V emerged from a complex stratified society fundamentally different from that of the Swabian Aurignacian hunther-gatherers. Of course, none of these considerations stopped the press from picking up on the sensational claims, with the Science piece, for example, enthusing that “the artifacts…might contain the earliest known symbolic precursors to writing.”
Needless to say, given the roughly 40,000 year gap between these artifacts and anything we can truly identify as writing, such claims are completely unfounded. Whether one takes “precursor” to trivially mean that early signs temporally preceded writing (and somehow later mutated to it), or that such early signs eventually inevitably led to the development of writing, the claim is unfounded: There simply isn’t the evidence to draw any connection between these marks and the much later development of pre-literate signs to which we can assign definite meanings.
In an attempt to get the discussion of these interesting artifacts back on a more tenable track, we (along with other colleagues) have published a preprint (d’Errico, et al. 2026) that critiques the BD analysis from a number of angles, noting that while the formal numerical correlations are interesting, they are semantically neutral. Statistical similarity does not translate into semiotic or functional equivalence, leaving the status of conventionality for these Paleolithic marks unproven. At the same time, we propose ways to deal with such data noting that “[t]he broader challenge is not to determine whether Paleolithic engravings resemble writing systems, but to develop robust frameworks capable of linking statistical structure to the behaviours and cultural practices that produced it.”
We identify several serious problems in BD’s study:
- Instability of mark classification. BD’s initial classification of marks suffers from low coding reliability. While raw inter-coder agreement was high (91–94%), the chance-corrected Cohen's kappa scores were extremely low (0.29 to 0.44), signifying only "fair-to-moderate" consensus. Treating these highly subjective categories as fixed, objective statistical units over-stabilizes the dataset artificially.
- The confound of sequence length. The high overlap on metrics like unigram entropy and type-token ratio occurred strictly with the Uruk V phase. However the Aurignacian and Uruk V datasets share nearly identical sequence length distributions. Because shorter paths intrinsically suppress combinatorial entropy and inflate apparent similarity, the statistical proximity could merely be an artifact of sequence length rather than shared structural complexity.
- Privileging a single metric for behavior. BD argued that figurines, in particular anthropomorphic and zoomorphic ivory figurines, showed sequences with higher entropy rates than other artifacts, such as tools. They take this as evidence that different marking patterns were applied to artifacts with different uses, which is at least consistent with the idea that the marks had meaning. But this conclusion rests selectively on a single variable (entropy rate), without considering whether other structural indices (like repetition rates or type-token ratios) converge to support the same behavioral hypothesis.
- No comparison against control sets of purely decorative systems. BD, while arguing that the Aurignacian marks were an early conventionalized sign system, are of course aware of the alternative possibility that they were simply decorative. Their answer to this is that “categories such as ‘decoration’ and ‘numerical system’ (but see above), or ‘decoration’ and ‘writing system’ are not mutually exclusive”. In and of itself, this is a valid point. Yet BD provide no analysis of how the marks compare to known decorative systems, comparing only against pre-literate accounting texts from Uruk, and later written language. As we discuss in the preprint, previous work (Sproat, 2014) has shown that on many measures, even purely decorative systems such as Pennsylvania barn stars can look like conventional sign systems, and so the analysis BD provide does not in fact eliminate the possibility that the marks had no communicative function other than aesthetics.
In summary, BD’s impressive-seeming results are based on a number of questionable points, including assumptions about sign classification, confounds such as sequence length, the selective focus on particular measures in drawing some conclusions, and the lack of any comparison of the Aurignacian marks to known decorative systems. This latter oversight is particularly significant since BD’s analysis does not, it seems to us, allow one to reject the null hypothesis that the Aurignacian marks were simply intended as decoration.
References
Bacon, B.; Khatiri, A.; Palmer, J.; Freeth, T.; Pettitt, P.; & Kentridge, R. (2023). An Upper Palaeolithic proto-writing system and phenological calendar. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.
Bentz, C. & Dutkiewicz, E. (2026). Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(9), Article e2520385123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2520385123.
d’Errico, F.; Santos da Rosa, N.; Courtenay, L. A.; Núñez, R.; Liu, C.; Sproat, R.; & Blasi, D.. Inferring Conventional Sign Systems from Paleolithic Engravings: Methodological and Theoretical Challenges (2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7053279 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7053279
Dutkiewicz, E. (2023). Die Kosmologie der Altsteinzeit in Kosmos – Vom Umgang mit der Welt zwischen Ausdruck und Ordnung (pp. 29-64). Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing.
Núñez, R. (2017). Is there really an evolved capacity for number? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 409-424.
Sproat, R. (2014). A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems. Language, 90(2), 457–481. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0031.
Above is a guest post by Richard Sproat and Rafael Núñez.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
July 19, 2026 @ 7:47 pm
Having finished reading the BD paper, I went on to d'Enrico et al.:and found
Figure 3: Perforations on wood made by acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes
formicivorus) in the Cuyamaca mountains of Southern California.
… which raises the fundamental question d'Enrico et al. fail to address: What is the woodpecker trying to tell us?
Sproat Richard said,
July 19, 2026 @ 8:41 pm
@Olaf Zimmerman
Good question, and we don't know of course, but "them's my acorns" would be a good initial guess.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 20, 2026 @ 2:24 am
To state one issue with B&D more plainly, a reader would like to feel confident that the statistically adjudged (relative) closeness of the Aurignacian marks to Uruk V reflects more than say short sequences + a few dozen sign types… which I must say I don't particularly.
Also, why not run statistical tests on the various separately-coded "1D sequences" independently. I'm guessing that "(relatively) close to Uruk V" would stand up, and one would dodge at least objection (1) of the OP.
But IMO the oddest part of B&D is the implication that the development of conventionalized symbol systems over the last ~40,000 years as (often controversially) attested in the archaeological record tracks not cultural development but literal human evolution i.e. that there is a question whether folks at this time depth had the cognitive capacity to devise and employ systems of the stated type (to quote the authors, "human intelligence arose through 'expanded information capacity' […] Our analyses […] suggest that the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Central Europe more than 40,000 y ago already had the information capacity to create a sign system comparable to protocuneiform in terms of information encoding potential." D’Errico et. al. appear not to share this (I think?) unconventional view ("the issue is […] not whether Paleolithic populations possessed the cognitive capacities necessary for complex symbolic behaviour." etc.).
WHICH IRONICALLY IS kinda why I still bet B&D are right. That is, "conventionalized symbol system" is totally plausible — just super vague is all. It IMO makes a way better null hypothesis than "decoration," as it's randomness ("rotten luck, it rained on the parade!"; "IDK, it just looks nice!") that is totally modern; "decoration" as often as not is a product of "designifying" if you will.
So this Aurignacian stuff and similar was in all likelihood totally symbolic; problem is generating an even slightly substantive (read: publishable) argument to that effect.
Sproat Richard said,
July 20, 2026 @ 3:02 am
@Jonathan Smith.
Well we can't *prove* it wasn't symbolic, of course, but then again as you point out coming up with a convincing argument that it was doesn't seem to be very plausible. At least showing statistical distributions of signs doesn't get at it, given the point about decorative patterns often also looking like symbolic systems according to various measures.
What indeed is the reasonable null hypothesis? I'm not sure I get your point about decoration being "as often as not is a product of 'designifying'". If you visit your local Color Tile store and examine the various styles of decorations, do any of them stand out as having originally been signifying?
But in any case, the real point here is the particular tools used in the demonstration by B&D, which seem at best ill-suited to the purpose.
Peter Cyrus said,
July 20, 2026 @ 3:21 am
If you paint a blaze on a tree to indicate the path, that's a sign, and it means something, but it doesn't represent language. I think debates like these would be more helpful if they distinguished written language from "writing".
Robot Therapist said,
July 20, 2026 @ 3:45 am
"If you paint a blaze on a tree to indicate the path, that's a sign, and it means something, but it doesn't represent language."
Likewise if I tie a knot in my handkerchief.
John Swindle said,
July 20, 2026 @ 5:57 am
Regarding knots in handkerchiefs,
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=50819
Richard Sproat said,
July 20, 2026 @ 7:03 am
BD were not just claiming that these were signs, but that they were *conventional* signs, meaning that they were a set of signs agreed upon by a community. It's not even clear that they were "signs" in the sense intended, much less conventional.
Yes, of course there is a distinction between symbol systems in general and *linguistic* symbol systems, viz. writing. People *do* distinguish those two: I have written extensively about this topic myself. Unfortunately it is also true that the distinction often gets muddied, especially in the popular press, as well as by academics who should know better. I could go on at length on that topic, but will spare you. Suffice it to say that on that point at least BD were clear: they weren't trying to claim this was writing.
Jerry Packard said,
July 20, 2026 @ 9:45 am
If I may jump down from the theoretical high-horse for a moment, I can imagine groups of paleo-accountants viewing and discussing the contents of these scribal etchings: “No, it says there were three, not two, deer forelegs, and the stone cisterns contained wine, not water” – from carved markings that did not reflect spoken language. It is just as imageable for those discussions to begin to refer to the graphs deictically with the names that they point to. As RWS well knows and points out here and elsewhere, the question is not if it happened but when & where, and along what chronological trajectory.
Richard Sproat said,
July 20, 2026 @ 9:57 pm
@Jerry Packard
“No, it says there were three, not two, deer forelegs, and the stone cisterns contained wine, not water”
Unless of course they spoke a language like Pirahã and (supposedly) don't know how to count :/
Rafael Núñez said,
July 21, 2026 @ 5:16 am
@Olaf Zimmermann
Maybe it was a joke, maybe it wasn’t. But just in case, here is a quick note for clarity: human and non-human animals leave traces when doing many activities —leaving footprints when walking on mud, for instance. As a survival strategy, acorn woodpeckers drill huge amounts of holes on dead wood to store acorns ahead of the winter when food is scarce. The patterns of holes vary tremendously, affected by many factors such as conditions of the wood, hole-density, etc. See examples here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acorn_Woodpecker_with_Hoard.jpg (author: Johnath)
The pattern shown in Fig. 3 of our paper happens to be in an array of holes that appear to be organized in “sequences” that invite for an interpretation in terms of a symbolic denotation signifying the quantities 12, 13, and 7. But, based on the outlier status of this case in the universe of patterns out there, and, importantly, based on what is known about the lack of symbolic-reference capacities (let alone a conventionalized one learned in ontogeny) in acorn woodpeckers, it is more than safe to say that the “sequence-looking” arrays in there are nothing other than the result of traces left behind by woodpeckers living their lives, with no specific communicative intention (like footprints on mud). Thus, following the principle of parsimony in science there is no need to ask/answer the question of “what is the woodpecker trying to tell us”.
David Marjanović said,
July 21, 2026 @ 8:17 am
…but we already knew that.
This "information capacity" is universal among humans today. That pretty much means it was present in our last common ancestor – about ten times as long ago as the Aurignacian.
BTW, the name of the journal is <inhale> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America <exhale> <inhale> <exhale>. The journal refers to itself as PNAS at every opportunity, and that's how everyone calls it when speaking*, but almost no other journal lets you cite it like that; it's either the real full name or Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA or the same with U.S.A..
* Some allegedly pronounce it "penis".
Yves Rehbein said,
July 21, 2026 @ 11:35 am
This critique is unfortunately too one-sided. Said Uruk V period – Uruk III is at the transition to proto-cuneiform and lower strata are counted up, so that's younger than Uruk V – pre-literate signs can hardly be assigned "definite meanings". There may be an educated guess or two, but the context is similarly limited. So, for one, the finding that entropy comes out the same on a back of the envelope calculation is entirely relative to the interpretation of those numerical systems. One citation to Overmann's lengthy treatment is certainly not enough for a casual reader to illustrate that point on either side of the argument, while directed to a casual reader at least your blog post definitely is! Englunds interpretation of later evidence is not universally accepted either, as far as I know. That "the respective tablets", which B&D have illustrated in Figure 2, "are commonly discussed as the precursors of cuneiform writing" is insufficient when they cite Schmandt-Besserat on that, who is most frequently cited for a very different claim, that clay tokens show precursors of cuneiform sign shapes.
Jerry Packard said,
July 21, 2026 @ 2:18 pm
@RWS
The end-of-sentence punctuation says it all :\
Jerry Packard said,
July 21, 2026 @ 2:32 pm
@RWS
That’s true; I didn’t notice that it had embedding
[it says [there were three…]]
But I’ll bet they could count to 7!
Jean Auel does a great job in her Mammoth Hunter series having us visualize our ancestors working on counting and
numeration.
Jerry Packard said,
July 21, 2026 @ 2:42 pm
Her Earth's Children series.
Richard Sproat said,
July 21, 2026 @ 3:21 pm
@ Yves Rehbein
'that's younger than Uruk V – pre-literate signs can hardly be assigned "definite meanings".'
I think we are pretty sure when it comes to the numerical signs in Uruk V, no?
Richard Sproat said,
July 21, 2026 @ 3:26 pm
@Yves Rehbein
And therein lies the crucial point.
Uruk V inscriptions look like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-cuneiform#/media/File:Numerical_tablet_Khafaje_OIM_A21310.jpg
We have a good reason to think they represent numbers because similar later signs clearly represent numbers.
Some of the Aurignacian "texts" are similarly sequences of marks. Maybe they're numbers? But we have nothing later that they *evolved into* that justifies that interpretation, any more than we have such a justification for Rafael's acorn woodpecker hole example.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 22, 2026 @ 8:00 pm
IMO the mark-arrays in question per se, 'transcribed' into "/////V///XX" and the like in B&D, don't lend themselves to meaningfully constrained hypothesis-testing at all, so I should speak of say a "(default) assumption" rather than a (technical-sounding) "null hypothesis."
There are lots of such mark-arrays in e.g. the Chinese Neolithic archaeological record as well, about which people want to say many things, for example that they are! or at least could easily be! literally ancestral! or at least spiritually antecedent! or something! to the Shang period inscriptions. We ignore them and their culturally-conditioned "teleologies."
But I still think it is odd to consider that such material should be regarded as "decorative" until definitively proven otherwise: call it a smell-test thing or say "aintnobodygottimeforthat" given the time/effort/materials involved. So I'm fine to allow that there are "conventionalized symbol systems" hiding all over, noting bene that "conventional" could mean me and my buddy get it; "symbol" could be "X" to mean "one of something"; and "system" could mean a couple such symbols.
So we await context/granularity/(much) more material, etc…
Richard Sproat said,
July 23, 2026 @ 10:31 pm
Well in semiotics, anything can be a sign, so if one wants to go to the limit, one could for example reason about Rafael's woodpecker holes thus:
The holes are a sign that a woodpecker put an acorn there. There are 10 holes in one row, 12 in the second … (or whatever), so we can regard these as signs (unintentional perhaps, though I guess the woodpecker really did intend to make that hole) that can be taken to denote the number of acorns placed in each row. Call it a woodpecker accounting system. I suppose one could even call it conventional — after all the woodpeckers seem to make the same holes again and again.
What it really comes down to is being able to demonstrate that these signs actually meant something in the same sense as the signs "5", or "鬼" mean something. Statistics alone certainly won't tell you that. One can of course have whatever prior beliefs about these systems one wants, but "gut feel" should not be the basis of publicity in science, though unfortunately having a "good story", which is often the near enemy of "gut feel", frequently does get the publicity.
As for decorative, versus otherwise, I could imagine linearizing this:
https://www.everwallpaper.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/banana-and-pineapple-mural-wallpaper-room.jpg?v=1739779339&width=2200
and coming up with pineapple-banana-banana-pineapple-pineapple-banana … which in that format might look as if it means something.
Chas Belov said,
July 23, 2026 @ 11:45 pm
@Jonathan Smith:
That Latlish caught my eye.
Yves Rehbein said,
July 26, 2026 @ 3:24 pm
I'm not sure I get your point about decoration being "as often as not is a product of 'designifying'" [@RWS]
I think the simple case in terms of fashion is that people work functional wear simply not as a fashion statement. The simplest example is black clothing to become invisible in the night, because it is intended not to be seen. When this becomes an actual fashion statement, there's a paradox that we may call designifying. Fashion will find different ways to make it clear, although that's on a symbolic level. The Emperor's New Clothes is a neat allegory that takes it over the top. Even if you have a yoghurt with your name on it in the communal fridge, that's saying don't even think of it — pretend you didn't see it.
On the other hand, the web presence of the KIŠIB project stresses that seals ensured: Trust (bolding in the original). The irony being, KIŠIB is advertised as a digital corpus but I searched high and low and there is no link to any sort of database. That's designifying. It evokes distrust, but the apology is imaginably simple. In more literal terms, however, de-sign- translates to sign off, sign and seal being cognates.
By the way, for tapestry pineapple-banana, I recall 2D videogame texture tiles for a structural background such as a lawn need to have a degree of entropy to hide the seems of the tiles. The entropy is intended.
I think we are pretty sure when it comes to the numerical signs in Uruk V, no? [@RWS]
I concede that expert witness is good evidence, but I expect the experts do not hesitate to point out that the context is so limited that little can be said with certainty. As I noted, my interest lies rather with the iconic pictographs that we see already from Uruk IV and Uruk III (CDLI). To conceive of the earlier numerical signs as pictographs is a tall order. That's the crux.
If they don't have that iconicity and if they are not accompanied by other signs, I have to argue with Frege that numbers are "formal meaningless entities" (after Núñez 2017, first paragraph). That I am not aware of counter claims is, of course, my own fault, but it seems blatantly obvious in context.
The woodpecker story may be different. It makes me think that reading rather than writing is a plausible precursor to writing, if only because the example of involuntary footprints is colexified with reading (German lesen "read, gather").
—
I am saying this now because a popular German TV show made a point of a song being canceled by programming, because the song incites violence. The show is satirical, therefore I believe that's a joke on the meta level, no song, no joke.
Corollary: It took a while longer until zero became conventionalized. Your saying that "in semiotics, anything can be a sign" (@RWS) strikes me as odd because it is controverted by the fact that nothing cannot be a signifier — pun firmly in cheek.
Richard Sproat said,
July 27, 2026 @ 10:39 pm
@Yves Rehbein
"The woodpecker story may be different. It makes me think that reading rather than writing is a plausible precursor to writing, if only because the example of involuntary footprints is colexified with reading (German lesen "read, gather")."
I'm sure those are colexified in many languages: one can also talk about reading tracks in English. There may be something in that idea: hunters would have learned early that one could "read" information from naturally occurring "signs".