Furniture conservator solves mystery of 20,000-year-old Ice Age drawings

Furniture conservator Ben Bacon made a crucial discovery in London which helped in understanding why cave paintings were drawn by the Ice Age hunter-gatherers.

The 20,000-year-old markings present on the drawings were analysed by Bacon who concluded that they may be referring to a lunar calendar.

This helped a specialist team in proving how notes were made by early Europeans about the timing of the reproductive cycles of the animals.

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Bacon stated he felt “surreal” to work on what hunter-gatherers were trying to say. Across Europe, researchers have found cave paintings of animals like fish, cattle and reindeer.

However, archaeologists had failed to decode the meaning of different marks on the paintings, which included dots. So, Bacon took it upon himself to decode the mystery behind marks.

After spending long hours researching in the British Library and on the internet, he "amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns".

Specifically, he looked for a 'Y' sign which was present in a few paintings, which he decoded can be a symbol for “giving birth” as it showed one line extending from the other.

As his research advanced, he took the help of senior academics and friends. He collaborated with a team which included Durham University's two professors and one professor from University College London.

As they worked on the birth cycles of animals present in today's world, they decoded that the hunter-gatherers were maintaining a record of the mating seasons of the animals using the markings on the cave paintings by lunar month.

The Cambridge Archeological Journal published the findings of the team. Durham University's Prof Paul Pettitt said that he is "glad he took it seriously" when Bacon reached out to him.

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"The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar,” he said.

"In turn, we're able to show that these people, who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux (in France) and Altamira (in Spain), also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species,” the professor said.

Bacon added that the ancestors were "a lot more like us than we had previously thought. These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer".

(With inputs from agencies)