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Fascinating prehistoric paintings have been discovered on the walls of caves in Europe, Africa and Australasia, but the meaning and function of these Stone Age masterpieces remain the subject of fierce debate. A group of researchers recently suggested that some of the most iconic examples of tomb art are actually lunar calendars marked by the world's oldest known writing system, although a new study has cast doubt on these remarkable claims.
Proposed in January 2023, the hypothesis focuses on European Upper Paleolithic rock paintings, most of which were created between 45 and 000 years ago. Noting that these drawings usually showed animals accompanied by abstract symbols such as dots or vertical lines, the first team of researchers hypothesized that these symbols represented days or months in the lunar calendar.
In support of this assumption, they noted that the total number of markings never exceeds 13, which corresponds to the number of lunar months in a year. Therefore, they hypothesize that these sequences represent the annual cycles of certain predator species, with the "Y" shape representing the month in which a particular animal usually gives birth.
However, according to the authors of the new criticism, there are actually few examples of sequences of lines and dots that exceed 13, which undermines the whole concept of a lunar cave art calendar. They also claim that these cases were deliberately excluded from the original analysis so as not to undermine the whole idea.
Casting further skepticism on the theory, the authors point out that all the animal species present in these paintings give birth in the first or second month of spring, and that ancient hunter-gatherers would hardly have needed to develop an artistic or semantic system simply to track this . "Why did Paleolithic people need a calendar to record or predict the mundane fact that all major herbivores give birth one or two months after the snow melts?" they ask rhetorically.
Noting these significant gaps in the theory, the researchers strongly dispute the conclusion reached in the previous study - namely that the symbol "Y" present in many ancient drawings functioned as the earliest known written word. In particular, supporters of the hypothesis claimed that this letter denoted a noun and had the meaning "to give birth".
Making a long list of arguments, the authors conclude that there is no strong evidence that these prehistoric artworks document lunar calendars or archaic writing systems. Looking for alternative possibilities in ethnographic studies of later petroglyphs, they suggest that abstract symbols such as dots most likely represent elements such as "bees, seeds, stars, raindrops, huts, hearths, footprints, or blood."
