Are These The First Human Writings Ever Produced?

And they are more than 10,000 years older than previous examples.

Transcript

00:00Humanity's writing systems have come a long way in the last couple of hundred years alone.

00:07But what was it like 20,000 years ago?

00:09Well, researchers studying ancient cave paintings may finally have that answer,

00:13as they believe they have just discovered the earliest example of human writing.

00:17This is what they are now calling the proto-writing system.

00:20But what does it mean?

00:21The researchers say the cave drawings depict records of animal mating seasons,

00:25broken down into the lunar months throughout the year.

00:27And while the writings don't contain letters per se,

00:30the dots, lines, and Y-shaped symbols do appear to mean something.

00:33The markings seem to indicate when each animal's mating season would happen.

00:37Crucial information for a hunter-gatherer group,

00:39with the Y symbol indicating a month of birth for a particular animal.

00:43But the most wild thing is that these symbols weren't simply found in one spot,

00:46but rather all over Europe in caves that were inhabited in the last ice age.

00:50With the discovery being especially interesting,

00:52as it means humans were using the written word 14,000 years earlier than experts previously thought.