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. 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? T e dots aren’t 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 see half circles and asterisks.


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 I built a database to record the signs and symbols at each site. It now contains data from more than 350 ice age sites. T e symbols outnumber the images of animals and people by a ratio of two to one. Here’s what’s really interesting. In all


the caves we’ve visited, we’ve only found 32 diff erent symbols. T ey are repeated across sites that span Europe. T ey cover a period of more than 30,000 years. 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. 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 harder to fi gure out.


Feather symbols look to some like a tree or plant. Others think they might be a weapon. But without someone to tell us, how can we know for sure? I may never know why our distant ancestors created a series of signs to communicate. But I will keep crawling through caves and recording data to try to fi nd out.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24