It is generally agreed among anthropologists that a "creative explosion" occurred around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago when humans began to think abstractly and create rock art. Typical of this period are the magnificent cave paintings of Chauvet in
France. Visual art was therefore a key marker of this increased human capacity.
Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic
writing system dating back to sometime in the 4th millenium B.C.
Chauvet however, contains relatively small and inconspicuous marks or “signs” around the paintings. Although recorded, it was thought that the marks were fairly insignificant, perhaps doodles or “fill” to occupy negative space.
Genevieve von Petzinger, when a student at the University of
Victoria in British Columbia,
Canada, brought all the records of cave paintings and the marks around them together to compare marks from different caves. In the end she compiled a database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in
France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Surprizingly there proved to be 26 signs, all drawn in the same
style, at numerous sites right over
France. Even beyond that, the same signs have now been recorded from prehistoric sites from
North and South America,
China,
India, Australia and South
Africa.
Could the same written symbolic system be a human universal upon which all later
writing from early
Chinese to
Egyptian hieroglyphs would be based?
See the article from New Scientist, Volume 205, Number 2748
Or check out
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527481.200-the-writing-on-the-cave-wall.html
