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40,000-year-old signs show humans were recording information long before writing
General • February 25, 2026
More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age
humans were
carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and
crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these Paleolithic signs reveals that they were not random decorations but structured sequences with measurable complexity. Surprisingly, their information density rivals that of proto-cuneiform, the earliest known writing system that emerged around 3,000 B.C.E.
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