Cracking the Paleolithic Dot and Dash Code by Martha Reed

I love amateur sleuth detective stories, especially those sleuths like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple who used their intelligence and plain old-fashioned common sense to solve the mystery.

I also believe that humans are hard-wired to share key information, especially back in the day when recording and sharing such data was critical to survival. Knowing and planning for the timing of herd animal and spawning fish migration patterns would’ve been critical for hunting these food resources.

Now, according to the BBC, a London furniture conservator named Ben Bacon is being credited with deciphering the reason that Ice Age hunter-gatherers added dots and “Y”s to their cave paintings.

After studying hundreds of cave painting images and looking for repeating patterns, Mr. Bacon surmised that the number of dots associated with each image corresponded to one of the 13 months in the natural lunar calendar. He suggested that “Y” symbol represented the animals giving birth. So for instance, if you were hunting aurochs (ancient cattle) you would travel to their traditional calving grounds during the fourth lunar cycle to find them.

Or with salmon, you could expect to see their river migration during the third lunar month:

According to some researchers, this dot and dash code may actually represent our oldest written language.

What do you think? Too far-fetched or is this blast from the past theory possible?