Anthropology

Bacon told Motherboard that putting all of this together has been “exhausting” and that the team will hold off on celebrating until they have published all of their findings. The researchers also anticipate arguments among experts around the exact definition of “writing” and whether their hypothetical calendar would neatly fall into that category.

“We do not want to press the controversial (and in many senses, semantic) question of whether writing was a Paleolithic invention; perhaps it is best described as a proto-writing system, an intermediary step between a simpler notation/convention and full-blown writing,” the researchers said in the study.”

“Assuming we have convinced colleagues of our correct identification, there will no doubt be a lively debate about precisely what this system should be called, and we are certainly open to suggestions,” they continued. “For now, we restrict our terminology to proto-writing in the form of a phrenological/meteorological calendar. It implies that a form of writing existed tens of thousands of years before the earliest Sumerian writing system.”