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The Adorant figurine

Are these marks the precursor to writing?
A series of notches carved on a piece of mammoth ivory roughly 40,000 years ago could be an early ancestor of cuneiform, one of the oldest-known forms of written language. “These sign sequences go beyond decoration that was aesthetically pleasing to particular individuals,” says linguist Christian Bentz.

Reference: PNAS paper




The Adorant figurine from Geißenklösterle Cave, in what is now Germany, is approximately 38,000 years old and bears a lion-human figure on one side and multiple sequences of notches and dots on the other. (Landesmuseum Württemberg/Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0) He co-authored a new study of the object and more than 200 other Stone Age artifacts that bear these signs. The study found statistical patterns in the Stone-Age marks that are similar to early proto-cuneform — but quite different to the information-dense writing systems of today.
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