Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - Symbols have always played an important role in human history, but when and where did the first symbols appear? How do we know if ancient etchings were symbolic in nature?
These are questions scientists are now trying to answer after having discovered hashtag-like etchings on a rock in South Africa's Blombos Cave. The etchings are estimated to be over 100,000 years old.
Are the etchings simply decorations or the first human symbols? Is it really possible to find out what our ancestors were thinking 100,000 years ago when they carved etchings onto red ochre stones?
100,000-Year-Old Etchings - Symbols Or Decorations?
Kristian Tylén, a cognitive scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark asked 65 Danish university students to study 24 images of stone markings and sort or copy the lines they saw.
The idea was to see if they could distinguish them from similar markings found at other sites as well as to determine how easy it was to reproduce them after only a single, brief viewing.
If the markings were symbolic, the researchers hypothesized, then they would be distinct based on the time they were created and the general location at which they were discovered.
Sadly however, the students were unable to distinguish the Blombos markings from other similar markings found at other sites.
Based on this result, Tylén thinks the South African etchings are only decorations. “That suggests that we’re not looking at a symbolic system in the sense that each marking has an individual meaning,” Tylén said.
Tylén’s study is interesting, but not all researchers are convinced this method can determine the intent of the scratched patterns. The entire subject is much more complicated.
Cory Stade, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, says the findings are more suggestive than definitive. Archaeologists often assume that early engravings are symbolic, but they don’t have a way to test them,” she says. “This approach would make it easier for more archaeologists to consider language and cognition,” which are difficult to understand from stone tools or bones.
Archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz from the University of Tübingen in Germany, who studies lines of dots and crosses on 40,000-year-old figurines from southwestern Germany, agrees. She’s convinced that the markings on her figurines are symbols, but would like to apply Tylén’s methods to learn more.
It is also possible the ancient South African engravings may have been used for communication purposes. Interesting patterns discovered in the caves of Pech Merle, Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac in southern France suggest man might have learned written communication 25,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Symbols As A Means Of Communication
Rock art in the Rouffignac cave has been dated to around 13,000 years old, while those at nearby Chauvet and Lascaux are thought to be more than 30,000 years old.
According to Genevieve von Petzinger, of the University of Victoria, in British Columbia the rock art found in the caves provide evidence our ancestors started to use symbols to communicate with each other.
Together with her colleague April Nowell, she has created a database of all the signs found in more than 200 caves and other shelters in France and Spain.
“There is definite patterning in the way these signs were used," von Petzinger said. The study shows rock art in French and Spanish caves appear to be a code that was painted on to rock by the Cro-Magnon people, who lived in Europe 30,000 years ago.
Some of the symbols found to recur among Palaeolithic cave paintings and other artefacts. Photograph: Genevieve von Petzinger
Researchers suggest this these markings could be some form of written language and may be our Stone Age ancestors' first attempt to communicate. If this assumption is correct, then scientists are forced to recognize birth of writing from about 6,000 years ago, to an incredible 30,000 years ago.
If the rock art in France and Spain was an attempt to establish communication, then why cannot the 100,000-year-old etchings found in South Africa have also been a very early method of exchanging contact and ideas between early man?
The fact remains, we really don't know the true purpose behind these ancient symbols.
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer
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