The Maya used "sign language" on an altar around 1,300 years ago, and these signs may represent important dates in the Maya Long Count Calendar, a new study claims.
"This is the oldest text where, to my knowledge, anyone has been able to show that there's a real, well-defined" script using hand signs that's on par with other kinds of writing study author Rich Sandoval, a linguistic anthropologist at Metropolitan State University of Denver, told Live Science. "Other researchers and I are pretty confident in saying that the conventions of these hand signs are rooted in sign language."
