Cave art decoded... paintings told Ice Age hunters when prey was mating
THEY are cryptic messages from our deep past, when humans were hunter-gatherers.
But the lines and dots which decorate some of our most famous cave paintings have finally been deciphered as the world’s earliest calendar, at over 20,000 years old.
The code for these symbols, found on pictures of animals, was cracked by a London furniture restorer who devoted seven years to the mystery.
Ben Bacon, 68, would scour academic databases on his daily commute; after compiling more than 700 images from the Upper Palaeolithic period, he found evidence that pigment dots and etched lines on animals measured when they mated.
Hunter-gatherers would need a record of when animals mated and gave birth, as this was when they were massed in large numbers and easier to hunt. Each line or dot stands for a lunar month counted from late spring. Mr Bacon, a fatherof-two, worked with a team of academics to publish a paper in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
He said: ‘I was up looking at cave paintings in the early hours, with a headache, but I was in a rabbit hole and determined to show these dots and lines were measuring time.
‘I wasn’t always in my family’s good books, and I got a firm no when I asked for pictures of cave paintings at Christmas and for birthdays.’ Now identified as a ‘proto-writing’ system, the symbols pre-date others by at least 10,000 years.
Professor Paul Pettitt, from Durham University, said: ‘We get contacted by hundreds of people a year, and often they have not found what they believe they have – but I am really glad I took Ben seriously.’
‘Cracked by a furniture restorer’