Museum Island Berlin: Research by the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte reveals 40,000-year-old writing-like systems

26.02.2026
Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte

Researchers at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte on Berlin's Museum Island have proven that humans were already using complex sign systems similar to early writing systems over 40,000 years ago.

New analyses by the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte suggest that the roots of writing-like information systems go back much further than previously assumed. Together with linguist Christian Bentz from Universität des Saarlands, archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz examined more than 3,000 geometric symbols on around 260 objects from the Paleolithic Age. The results were published in the journal PNAS.

The artifacts analyzed, including finds from caves in the Swabian Alb such as the mammoth from the Vogelherd Cave, the so-called “Adorant” from the Geißenklösterle Cave, and the lion man from the Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave, bear recurring lines, dots, notches, and crosses. Using computer-assisted methods and quantitative linguistic procedures, the research team examined the statistical properties of these character sequences. 

40,000-year-old characters exhibit structural complexity 

The result: the approximately 40,000-year-old characters exhibit a structural complexity and information density comparable to the earliest proto-cuneiform script from Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC. Although the Stone Age symbols do not represent a spoken language, their systematic and repetitive arrangement suggests deliberate visual information coding.

The project “The Evolution of Visual Information Coding” (EVINE), funded by the European Research Council, investigates the development of such sign systems from the Paleolithic era to the first writing systems.