NEW | 40,000-Year-Old "Proto-Writing" Discovered on Ice Age Artefacts

This week an incredible news story hit the media, that this small ivory plaque, known as 'The Adorant' figurine of Geibenklosterle cave in Germany, has a sequence of notches and dots on its reverse side, which could well be a type of notation system, aka a primitive way to record information.

The study, titled ‘Humans 40,000 Years Ago Developed a System of Conventional Signs’, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and focusses on the famous mobile artefacts of the ice age. You can download the new paper for free here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520385123

In this video I'll tell you exactly what has been discovered and why it's important in our understanding of the prehistoric Ice Age Aurignacian culture of Europe.

Following on from this video, I've added three short videos I've previously made, the first one on the Lion Man Figurine, the second on the Vogelherd Animals and the third one on the Adorant Plaque. You can navigate to each video by selecting the relevant chapter below.

All images used in this video are taken from the sources listed, and also from Google Images, for educational purposes only. Please Subscribe to Ancient Architects, Like the video, and please leave a comment below. Thank you.

Video Contents:

0:00 Introduction
0:29 The Story
1:48 The Method Behind the Discovery
2:27 The Claims
5:20 The Mobile Art of Ice Age Europe
6:08 Concluding Remarks
7:22 The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave
15:05 40,000-Year-Old Animals Figurines of Vogelherd Cave
21:50 The Adorant Plaque of Geißenklösterle Cave

Sources:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260225001301.htm
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520385123
https://www.academia.edu/102742490/Early_symbolism_in_the_Ach_and_the_Lone_valleys_of_southwestern_Germany
Von Petzinger TedTalk: https://youtu.be/hJnEQCMA5Sg?si=HkNBH-NDNriAVFuM
My previous video on Ice Age Symbols: https://youtu.be/vkvLC1VrnvI?si=haHfF17jUAD1ylgR
Stefan Milo video: https://youtu.be/pv0RscAummQ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cave-lion-and-hybrid-lion-man-representations-from-the-Swabian-Aurignacian-1-2_fig5_284721009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3328229.stm
https://donsmaps.com/lionlady.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man#interpretation https://donsmaps.com/vogelherd.html
https://journals.openedition.org/palethnologie/888
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelherd_Cave
https://journals.openedition.org/palethnologie/885
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286381212_The_Hohle_Fels_'Venus'_Some_remarks_on_animals_humans_and_metaphorical_relationships_in_early_Upper_Palaeolithic_Art
https://donsmaps.com/adorant.html
https://www.donsmaps.com/hohlefelssite.html
https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/apa/article/view/71507
Mouth bow video: https://youtu.be/XVdCZ6I-4QY
https://www3.astronomicalheritage.net/index.php/show-entity?identity=84&idsubentity=1
https://medium.com/prismnpen/pursuing-the-perseids-7e27029f7a8
https://www.astronomytrek.com/is-the-ach-valley-tusk-fragment-an-ancient-star-map/
https://rockartblog.blogspot.com/2018/11/another-bogus-paleolithic-star-map-ach.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2679675.stm
Orion movement video (Digmos):
https://youtu.be/sNqVRzjTSFg
Orion Timelapse video (Harles Garage): https://youtu.be/Z6r_NXYysAE

#ancientarchitects #prehistoric #iceage