Unravel the mystery of encrypted messages found in ice age caves.

At least 20,000 years ago, people living in Europe created amazing animal rock paintings that they combined with strange markings such as stripes, dots, and Y-shaped symbols.

Well-known to scientists, these markings may be linked to seasonal predator behavior, a new study claims, making them the first known writing in human history.

These drawings represented mysterious messages from our deep past when humans were hunters and gatherers.

The lines and dots that adorn some of the world’s most famous rock paintings have finally been deciphered as the world’s oldest calendar, over 20,000 years old.

A British furniture restorer, with the support of two professors from Durham University, has discovered one of the most important functions of prehistoric painting, which helped to understand how the hunters and gatherers of the Ice Age recorded information about the environment in order to survive.

Scientist Ben Bacon, 68, has been rummaging through academic databases on his daily commute after collecting more than 700 images from the Upper Paleolithic period and finding evidence that pigment dots and stripes etched into animals were measured during mating.

Hunters and gatherers of the era needed records of when animals mate and give birth, such as when they are herded in larger numbers and easier to hunt.

According to an article published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, each line or dot refers to a lunar month counted from late spring.

Archaeologists have long known that the sequences of dots, lines and other signs in the drawings have meaning, but no one has been able to decipher them. So Bacon, a stranger to historical science, decided to try to understand these signs.

After spending many hours looking at rock paintings online and in books, the restorer began to look for repeating patterns and was especially interested in the letter “Y”, which he suggested could mean “birth” because it showed a line that came from two others. . .

Thus, by calculating the birth cycles of modern animals, the researchers concluded that the number of markings on the plates was a record for the lunar months for the mating seasons of animals, according to the study.

Bacon later contacted paleontologist Paul Pettit and psychology professor Robert Kentridge to share his theory about the drawings. Scholars pledged to develop Bacon’s ideas together.

“This is a fascinating study that involved independent researchers and experts,” Pettitt said. “The results show that hunter-gatherers and animals of the Ice Age were the first to use a systematic calendar and markers to record information about key environmental events in this calendar,” the paleontologist explained.

Source: Daily Mail