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Connecting the dots - 30th January 2023

A Londoner’s solved a mystery which stumped archaeologists for years. Ben Bacon’s identified the dots on Ice Age cave paintings as a reference to the lunar calendar and animals’ reproductive cycles.

Bacon said making the discovery was "surreal." He works as a furniture conservator and has no formal archaeological training, but he was fascinated by early humans’ cave paintings.

As Bacon spent countless hours researching on the internet and reviewing pictures in the British Library, patterns began to emerge.

He noticed many of the animals depicted, such as cattle, reindeer and fish, were accompanied by a series of dots. These often appeared alongside a ‘Y’ symbol, which Bacon interpreted as giving birth since it showed one line growing out of another.

Experts offered no rationale for why prehistoric humans drew the dots 20,000 years ago, so Bacon decided he would attempt to decode them. He decided to collaborate with two professors from Durham University.

Even though he was as they said "effectively a person off the street," the academics agreed to join forces. Bacon's team compared the reproductive cycles of similar species today with the records made on the cave painting animals. They concluded that these marks referred to the lunar calendar and each creature’s mating season.

The theory which emerged has huge significance. Professor Paul Pettitt, one of Bacon’s co-researchers, said "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."

This means the hunter-gatherers who created murals in Lascaux and Altamira created a way of measuring time, something which is a cornerstone of modern day civilisation.

Bacon himself reflects that our ancestors are more similar to us contemporary humans than we'd like to think. He stated, "These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer."