Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[jimmy olsen]

Very interesting. Surprising that physical apperance can undergo such strong selection in just a few thousand years.

[mongers]

Posting this as we don't seem to have Tim around these days to do it?

A figurine called Adorant from Geissenkloesterle Cave, located near the town of Blaubeuren in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, made approximately 40,000 years old and consisting of a small ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots, is displayed, in Stuttgart, Germany, February 23,...

40,000-year-old German artifacts may display written language precursor
By Will Dunham
February 24, 20262:03 PM GMT Updated February 24, 2026

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - A small object called the Adorant figurine discovered in a cave in Germany in 1979 - crafted roughly 40,000 years ago by some of the earliest people to establish a distinct culture in Europe - bears intriguing sequences of notches and dots. Numerous other objects produced by this same culture exhibit similar marks.
New research suggests these marks on objects like this figurine, made of mammoth ivory and depicting a hybrid lion-human creature, fall short of amounting to a written language. But it found that their sequential use on these artifacts displayed properties similar to a script that emerged much later in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3300 BC, that was a forerunner to cuneiform, one of the oldest-known forms of written language.

This suggests remarkable cognitive abilities for such ancient people. The artifacts date to a time when our species was spreading across Europe - traversing the landscape as bands of hunter-gatherers - after trekking out of Africa, encountering our close relatives the Neanderthals along the way.
The researchers use the term sign types to describe these marks, which include notches, dots, lines, crosses, star shapes and some others. They conducted a computational analysis of their use on these artifacts for a trait called information density. This concept refers to the amount of information conveyed per unit of language, like a syllable or in this case a sign.

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Full article here:

40,000-year-old German artifacts may display written language precursor

[crazy canuck]

You beat me to it Mongers, very cool.