How a furniture conservator helped crack the code of Ice Age cave art

Scientists say they have begun to decipher the symbols on Ice Age cave art  — and it all started with a hunch by an enthusiastic layperson. 

Ben Bacon, a London furniture conservator and amateur anthropologist, was looking at images of paleolithic cave drawings when he started to notice patterns in the dots, lines and other symbols that are often scrawled over depictions of animals. 

"I'm afraid I'm slightly obsessive, and once I started looking at these, I looked at more and more," Bacon told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "You do become quite absorbed in this. It's very beautiful."

Bacon teamed up with academics at Durham University and University College London, as well as two other hobbyist archaeologists in his circle, to take a closer look. 

The researchers identified the markings as a "proto-writing" system, used to track information about the depicted animals — including their migration routes and mating cycles.

Their findings — published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal — suggest that people who lived some 20,000 years ago had a sophisticated and practical way of communicating important information about the animals they hunted.

It all began when Bacon was poring through images of cave art, and noticed that several different drawings of fish were accompanied by either three bars or three dots.

"I thought it must be a communication system of some sort," he said. "Then I looked to see if anyone had actually figured out what these marks meant. And apparently they hadn't, which was a bit of a revelation."

His work piqued the curiosity of  Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, and co-author of the study. He told BBC News he's "glad he took it seriously" when Bacon reached out.

Pettitt brought the topic to his longtime collaborator, Durham psychologist Robert Kentridge. Together, the pair had been working to interpret the meanings of — and motivations behind — ancient cave art.

"[Bacon's] theories, especially given the mass of data he had compiled, seemed ripe for testing," Kentridge told CBC in an email.

Together, the team looked at hundreds of images from the European Upper Paleolithic era. They focused on three symbols — Ys, lines, and dots— and determined the latter two made up a lunar calendar. 

"They were using this calendar to record and locate their prey for future hunts," Bacon said. "I think this was giving them just that little edge in their daily battle, you know, managing resources, being efficient hunters."

On that calendar, the researchers theorize the "Y" represents giving birth, meaning the hunter-gatherers were tracking animals' reproductive cycles. The study notes the symbolism of one line becoming two, or "two parted legs."