Another paper on Upper Palaeolithic marking systems has been getting a lot of attention, and various colleagues have been asking my opinion on it. I am not any kind of expert on this period but I do have a few thoughts and I figure that it’s time to get them into shape.

Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz argue that sequences of signs on a corpus of 260 mobile artefacts from the Swabian Aurignacian bear a statistical signature of information-density that is consistent with sequences of signs on a set of non-linguistic Mesopotamian clay tablets from the Uruk V layer, ie, the proto-cuneiform texts that predated the emergence of writing. While Aurignacian objects retain a roughly stable information density over 10,000 years, the Uruk material is different. Clay documents from the later period, known to represent the Sumerian language, have a far greater information-density.

Assuming that the coding of the primary data is reliable and its analysis is robust, this finding is definitely interesting. It amounts to a demonstration that two sequential-marking practices—separated by time, geography and cultural context—have similar statistical patterns. And if the marks on the Aurignacian artefacts are symbolic, as opposed to decorative, this patterning suggests that they may have functional affordances that line up with the earlier Uruk material. All this confirms the observation that human societies have been using graphic codes for a long time, that they innovate these codes independently of one another, and that some these codes may have convergent properties. They can also be adapted to carry different information loads under different conditions.

This has turned out to be a long essay rather than the short blog post I first imagined, but the tl;dr version is this: Bentz and Dutkiewicz have produced a thought-provoking paper that is theoretically well motivated. Its implications are modest yet important, and the methodology should be taken seriously, despite genuine challenges and limitations that I have tried to identify below.