How a Furniture Conservator Solved a 20,000-Year-Old Ice Age Puzzle
Elements of Paleolithic cave art had confused experts since their discovery
If we travel back to the Stone Age, we shall see one of our ancestors’ greatest legacies: Paleolithic cave paintings. It was the start of human creativity. Early humans left a tremendous artistic legacy. Their paintings and carvings on the walls of caves and rocks show their talent. The art gives us a look into the culture and beliefs of Paleolithic humans.
These adept artists were not only survival masters but also creative thinkers who built intricate homes out of mammoth bones, developed the technique of stone tool-making, and sculpted exquisite stone figures.
But these artworks conceal a long-held secret.
Our forefathers were far brighter than we imagined. They’ve left clues to a remarkable discovery that will wow us today. They may have developed the first known calendar 10,000 years before civilization began.
Are you as taken aback as I was when I first heard the news?
In 2022, an amateur archaeologist and furniture conservator, Ben Bacon, solved the mysterious puzzle of markings in Paleolithic cave art. This is one of the most remarkable discoveries of this year and perhaps ever.
When I started writing about history and archaeology, I was curious about our past. I admire Bacon’s persistence because it inspires those who don’t have formal training to understand the most critical driver to discover human history.
Passion.
Before we discuss the fascinating work by Bacon, let’s talk a bit about Paleolithic cave art.
A brief history of Paleo cave art
The Upper Paleolithic period, which lasted from 50,000 ybp to 12,000 ybp (years before the present), saw human ingenuity's beginnings.
This epoch produced remarkable cave art, with over 200 caves in Europe (particularly in southern France and northern Spain) showcasing exquisite paintings, sketches, and sculptures.
These artworks adorn the cave walls and ceilings and show early humans’ ability to express meaning and communicate.
The most prominent motifs in these cave paintings are enormous wild animals such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, all hunted by humans. The creatures in the paintings were not always the same as those found in accompanying bone deposits.
For example, the painters of Lascaux, France, mainly left reindeer bones, but this species appears nowhere in the cave paintings. Horses are the most frequently depicted. Human drawings in caves are uncommon, but when found, they are usually schematic rather than realistic. Tracings of hand and hand stencils and abstract patterns known as finger flutings were popular among early artists.
The colors used to produce the art include red and yellow ochre, manganese or carbon for black, and china clay for white. Colors were sometimes created by combining pigments with fat. The artists applied paint with fingers, chewed sticks, or fur brushes.
The people who created these paintings used techniques rarely found in other cave art. This means every community had its style. Many of the paintings, for example, were made after they had cleansed the walls of debris and concretions, resulting in a smoother surface.
Incising or etching around the edges of some figures gave the paintings a three-dimensional look and the impression that they were moving.
The artwork incorporates intricate scenarios, such as animals interacting with one another. One example is a pair of woolly rhinoceroses butting horns in a territorial or mating rights dispute.
Lascaux, dating from around 15,000 BC, is a network of interconnecting caves in southwestern France that houses one of the most outstanding collections of Paleolithic art.
There are almost 2,000 figures in the cave. They are mostly animals, people, and abstract signs.
Over 900 images depict animals from the surrounding areas, including horses, stags, aurochs, bison, lions, bears, and birds, all of which early humans hunted and consumed. The paintings feature no depictions of the surrounding area or plants.
Another magnificent site in southern France with Paleolithic art is the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, which dates back to around 30,000 BC.
This enormous cave contains some of the earliest known paintings and traces of an Upper Paleolithic society. At least 13 distinct animal species are depicted in the paintings, including herbivores and predatory animals like lions, panthers, bears, and hyenas.
However, as is true of most cave art, they had no complete human depictions. Instead, the cave has a few panels with red ochre-pigmented hand prints, stencils, and abstract marks like lines and dots. For decades, these lines and dots have baffled archaeologists.
Were our ancestors trying to convey something to us?
Solving a 20,000-year-old puzzle
Enter amateur furniture conservator Ben Bacon, who may have solved a mystery that has eluded archaeologists for years.
The meaning behind the seemingly random markings found in over 600 Ice Age images has long been a subject of fascination, but now Bacon has an answer. After reviewing previous research and dedicating countless hours to data analysis, Bacon theorized that the markings relate to animal life cycles.
With the support of two professors from Durham University and one from University College London, Bacon’s findings have been published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
These markings can be considered a form of proto-writing. They reveal information recordings and a reference to a lunar calendar. This 20,000-year-old discovery shows that the dots, lines, and shapes sequences were sophisticated records of when animals were breeding.
Using the birth cycles of modern-day animals as a reference, the team deciphered the number of marks showing the lunar month when the animals gave birth. Bacon also believes that a Y symbol, seen in some paintings by adding a diverging line to another, symbolizes an animal giving birth.
He was always captivated by the meaning of these markings. He approached the task of decoding them using the same method to understand early Greek text. He gathered data from sources such as the British Library and the Internet, searched for repeating patterns, and contacted academics for their expertise.
Hours of hard work paid off, and Bacon says it was surreal to decipher what people 20,000 years ago were saying.
Professor Petty from Durham University says that the results show Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic lunar calendar, adding to the growing evidence of their sophisticated culture and beliefs.
Ben Bacon will go down in history books as the person who solved a critical riddle. He is not an archaeologist but has uncovered one of the most significant archaeological discoveries ever. This goes to show curiosity and perseverance can take us places even without formal training.
Do you enjoy tales from lost civilizations and cultures from the ancient world and the Middle Ages?
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I'm always curious on things like this in relation to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
I can think of few other works of art that are as spellbinding and evocative as those of Chauvet and Lascaux. Ever since I heard about them I have been so jealous of those lucky modern humans who got to be the first to see those masterpieces since the Ice Age! Sadly I don’t think it’s possible to see the real thing anymore, but I’d rather preserve them for future generations than risk having them ruined.
The gentleman who worked in his spare time to decode those marks is a real inspiration, but are we sure that it’s “solved?” I haven’t had a chance to dig into the literature but it seems to me it would be quite difficult to prove. It does seem like a theory that has a lot of support from professionals in that field though. And it seems like a great interpretation to me.
Thanks for writing about this, it’s good to I’m far from alone in my admiration of those works. Have you watched Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams?”