tsp

A London furniture conservator has been credited with a crucial discovery that has helped understand why Ice Age hunter-gatherers drew cave paintings.

Archaeologists had been stumped by the meaning of dots and other marks on the paintings. So Mr Bacon decided he would try and decode them.

He spent numerous hours on the internet and in the British Library consulting pictures of cave paintings and "amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns".

With his research advancing, he brought in friends and senior academics. They encouraged him to continue with his investigations despite Mr Bacon being "effectively a person off the street".

He collaborated with a team including two professors from Durham University and one from University College London and, by working out the birth cycles of similar present-day animals, they deduced that the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals' mating seasons.

The team's findings were published in the Cambridge Archeological Journal.

Prof Paul Pettitt, of Durham University, said he was "glad he took it seriously" when Mr Bacon contacted him.

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SCIENCE

Stone Age code is cracked by amateur archaeologist

Rhys Blakely, Science Correspondent

Thursday January 05 2023, 12.01am, The Times

A sequence of four dots on a painting of a bull on the wall of Lascaux Cave in France

An amateur archaeologist appears to have deciphered a Stone Age writing system that experts believe is the oldest ever discovered.

Ben Bacon, a furniture restorer by day, spent many evenings poring over pictures of cave paintings of mammoths and other prehistoric animals. His analysis, which has been backed by university professors, suggests that the paintings, which are up to 25,000 years old, use symbols to relay information.

“I’m interested in writing, how it develops,” Bacon, 67, said. “What we have here is a simple writing system.”

He believes that palaeolithic hunter-gatherers used symbols to store information on the breeding cycles of their prey. The symbols were used across Europe until the end of the Ice Age, roughly 11,000 years ago, and could date back up

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News

Newspaper front pages from around the world, 05 January 2023

We take a look at the stories and pictures that made the front pages of newspapers around the world on Thursday 05 January 2023.

byAdamu Andrew

05-01-2023 10:16

in News

Bundle of newspapers on the table. Photo: Pixabay

Here are the news stories that made the front pages of newspapers around the world. Today’s Newspaper fronts for Thursday, 05 January 2023 – Newspapers across the globe.