Earliest-Known Human Writings Are 35,000 Years Older Than Previously Known
- Feb 27
- 1 min read
In ancient caves in the Swabian Jura, a remote mountain range located in southwestern Germany, researchers have uncovered evidence that humans were experimenting with symbolic writing over 40,000 years ago - tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
“The artifacts date back to tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems, to the time when Homo sapiens left Africa, settled in Europe, and encountered Neanderthal,” explained Ewa Dutkiewicz, a study co-author and archaeologist at Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History.
The team studied 260 relics, including the mammoth tusk figurine pictured above which is also etched with multiple sequences of notches and dots - suggesting a notational system. After analyzing more than 3,000 of these carvings using quantitative linguistics and statistical modelling, they found the signs showed similarities to the earliest-known writing from ancient Mesopotamia, which didn’t emerge until around 3,000 B.C.
The findings in the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge the timeline of written communication. “The human ability to encode information in signs and symbols was developed over many thousands of years,” says study co-author Christian Bentz. “There are many sign sequences to be found on artifacts. We’ve only just scratched the surface,” Ewa Dutkiewicz added.
