More Red Dots T is is where Dillon stops. T e passage is too narrow for him to continue with his camera gear. I press on alone. I see more red dots. T ese are grouped around hollows in the ceiling. T e dots continue all the way to the back of the cave. I realize I am now more than half a kilometer from the cave’s entrance. I pause to refl ect. T e size of this passage
hasn’t changed much since ancient times. And yet, ice age people braved these dark depths to leave behind the red dots. T ey must have been important. But what do they mean? Red dots are not the only symbols we’ve
found. We’ve seen lines and circles and spirals and triangles. We’ve seen symbols called penniforms. T ey look like feathers or trees. We’ve seen half circles and asterisks. I built a database to record and catalogue
the signs and symbols at each site. It now contains more than 350 ice age sites. T e mysterious geometric symbols outnumber the images of animals and people by a ratio of at least two to one.
WORDWISE
engraving: the process of cutting or carving a design on a hard surface
ice age: any of several cold periods during which glaciers covered much of Earth
symbol: something that stands for or represents something else
22 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER
Looking for Meaning T e amazing thing is that however many caves we’ve visited, we found the same 32 symbols being used again and again and again. So, 32 symbols are repeated across sites that span an entire continent. T ey cover a period of more than 30,000 years. But what do they stand for? I can tell you what they are not. T ey are not
a form of written language. T e oldest written texts appear only 5,000 years ago. But these symbols appear some 25,000 years before that. Europe’s cave artists did not have enough
geometric signs to represent all the words that would have occurred in their language. Nor do the symbols repeat enough to be some sort of alphabet. We can make educated guesses about
what these symbols might have meant. Some markings, such as the squiggly lines I found on a cave wall in Portugal, may have been part of a map. T ey may have shown a river or other landform. Other signs are more mysterious. T e
penniform symbol looks to some like a tree or plant. Others interpret it as a weapon. But without someone to tell us or some record to explain the symbols, how can we know? Right now, I believe it’s unlikely we will ever
know for sure what the ice age signs mean. I believe that what we’re seeing are the fi rst steps in graphic communication. Of course, I would love to know why our distant ancestors created this series of signs to communicate. I accept that I may never know what the
symbols mean. Still, I will keep crawling through caves and assembling data to try to fi nd answers.
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