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

A series of notches carved on a piece of mammoth ivory roughly 40,000 years ago could be an early ancestor of cuneiform, one of the oldest-known forms of written language. “These sign sequences go beyond decoration that was aesthetically pleasing to particular individuals,” says linguist Christian Bentz. He co-authored a new study of the object and more than 200 other Stone Age artefacts that bear these signs. The study found statistical patterns in the Stone-Age marks that are similar to early proto-cuneform — but quite different to the information-dense writing systems of today.