A study including two Durham University professors has found that ice age hunter-gatherers used cave paintings to record information about their surroundings which helped them to survive.
Professors Paul Pettitt and Robert Kentridge have worked together developing the field of visual palaeopsychology, the scientific investigation of the psychology that underpins the earliest development of human visual culture. They were approached by London-based furniture conservator Ben Bacon who spent countless hours looking at examples of cave painting and analysing data.
Working together with a team of specialists on decoding drawings for the first time, it has been proven that at least 20,000 years ago people across Europe made notes about wild animals and the timings of their reproduction cycles. This "proto-writing" system pre-dates others that are thought to have emerged during the Near Eastern Neolithic period by about 10,000 years.
