Research by Christian Bentz: Stone Age symbols as complex as early proto-cuneiform.

Around 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors carved symbols into tools and sculptures to record and share their thoughts: lines, dots, notches or crosses that were often repeated. For Christian Bentz, Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Language Technology at Saarland University, it is clear: ‘An early alternative to writing’. As part of the research project The Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE), which is funded by the European Research Council with an ERC Starting Grant, Christian Bentz, in collaboration with archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz from the Museum of Prehistory and Early History of the Berlin State Museums, has now succeeded in deciphering the DNA of Stone Age sign systems in more detail – with a result that surprised even the research duo. 

The subject of the investigation was not the specific meaning of the symbols – which remains unclear – but their fundamental, measurable properties. Using computer-assisted methods of quantitative linguistics, the researchers analysed more than 3,000 geometric symbols on around 260 objects for certain regularities and frequency patterns in order to identify similarities and differences with later symbol systems. ‘We were able to show that, as a result of the high repetition rates of the Palaeolithic symbols and the easy predictability of the subsequent symbol, the so-called entropy – a measure of information density – is comparable to the proto-cuneiform script that emerged 40 millennia later,’ Christian Bentz summarises the results. This result surprised the research team in that they had expected the early proto-cuneiform script to be much closer to today's writing systems simply because of its relative proximity in time. Conversely, this means that little appears to have changed between the Palaeolithic era and the first proto-cuneiform script. ‘After that, around 5,000 years ago, a new system emerged relatively suddenly that reflects spoken language – and there, of course, we find completely different statistical properties,’ explains Christian Bentz.

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