Experts from Durham University and University College London have discovered that 20,000 years ago ancient humans used a calendar view – European hunters and gatherers marked on rock paintings in which month certain animals spawned. The researchers wrote more about this in a journal article. Cambridge Journal of Archeology.
Hunters and gatherers in many parts of Europe left rows of dots, lines, and other markings alongside rock carvings of deer, horses, fish, bison, and other animals. For a long time, researchers had trouble interpreting these signs, but now they’ve learned that the signs point to the moon according to the lunar calendar in which animals reproduce.
“Hunter-gatherers of the Ice Age were the first to use signs to record a systematic calendar and information about important environmental events on that calendar. The hunter-gatherers of the Ice Age did not just live in the present, they recorded memories of past events and used them to record similar events in the future. They used it to predict when it would happen.
They emphasized that these signs can be considered as a “proto-writing” system that emerged at least 10 thousand years before the known ones. The discovery also shows that people at that time could predict future events and “move” in time mentally.