Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte

Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte

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Mammoth figurine from the Vogelherd Cave with clear markings of geometric signs.
Mammoth figurine from the Vogelherd Cave with clear markings of geometric signs. © Universität Tübingen / Ewa Dutkiewicz
Mammoth figurine from the Vogelherd Cave with clear markings of geometric signs. The picture on the right shows a row of crosses.
Mammoth figurine from the Vogelherd Cave with clear markings of geometric signs. The picture on the right shows a row of crosses. © Universität Tübingen / Ewa Dutkiewicz
Maps of Aurignacian sites in Europe and the Near East with zoom on the areas where the most objects with geometric signs were found, triangles show an archaeological site where artefacts with geometric signs are present.
Maps of Aurignacian sites in Europe and the Near East with zoom on the areas where the most objects with geometric signs were found, triangles show an archaeological site where artefacts with geometric signs are present. © EVINE / Christian Bentz
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The Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE)

Humans store information outside of their minds. This capacity for information encoding is reflected in symbols and written language, and it forms the basis of artificial computing systems. It is a hallmark of human evolution. Traces of this capacity have been “fossilized” in the archaeological record reaching back into the Paleolithic of 400,000 to 11,000 years ago. The EVINE project (Evolution of Visual INformation Encoding) proposes to digitize large numbers of samples of Paleolithic finds, and to compare their information encoding potential to ancient and modern writing. This enables us to pinpoint the transitions in information encoding from the first visual symbols to the information age.

Language leaves no trace in the fossil record. However, an important component of the human capacity for language, symbolic combinatoriality, might have “fossilized” after all.

In the Paleolithic period, anatomically modern humans embarked on their journey from Africa to the rest of the world. Along the way, they left artefacts that provide a window into their minds. Some of these artefacts bear early examples of visual information encoding: geometric signs. Analyses of isolated archaeological finds currently suggest that these signs were used as artificial memory systems in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe around 45,000 to 11,000 years ago. The codes being used seem to have become more complex towards the end of this period. However, how we can precisely quantify and model this increase in complexity is a question that remains unanswered by research in the field.

The EVINE project proposes to marry the growing body of archaeological data with state-of-the-art tools from empirical linguistics to assess the Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE) in the human lineage. To this end, statistical measures based on information theory, quantitative linguistic laws, classification algorithms need to be developed and applied to sequences of Paleolithic signs, ancient writing, and modern writing.

This process could transform our understanding of how information encoding evolved from the first visual symbols to the information age.

Project management: Dr Christian Bentz, Chair for Multilingual Computational Linguistics, University of Passau
Contact person: Dr Ewa Dutkiewicz, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Funding: European Research Council (ERC, EVINE, 101117111)
Duration: 2024–2028
Project websites: www.erc-evine.de, www.signbase.org