This is either true or I’m crazy, Bennett Bacon thought, as he crossed north London one evening in the spring of 2017. In his bag was a good bottle of bordeaux and a hardback volume on Ice Age art from the 1970s, feathered with Post-its.
Bacon has just turned 70 and works as a carver and gilder of fine furniture. In his free time, he likes to decode the mysterious symbols that constellate the walls of European palaeolithic art caves and that show up carved on bones. On that April evening, he believed he may have cracked some of the earliest written codes that exist. Marks that predated the accepted birth of writing by approximately 20,000 years. But he couldn’t be absolutely sure. He was hoping that, if his epiphany was “just another wacky theory”, as he put it to me last October, then Tony Freeth, a mathematician at University College London, might be good enough to tell him. And he’d heard that Freeth liked bordeaux.
Between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers, sheltering on the fringes of the frigid mammoth steppe that shrouded much of the European landmass, entered limestone cave networks, such as Altamira in northern Spain and Chauvet and Lascaux in southern France, carrying pigments. Yellow and red ochres, black manganese oxides, white kaolin clay. On the walls, they rendered images of the beasts that filled their world. Mammoths and bison in heart-thumping lifelikeness. Aurochs and horses. Reindeer and salmon.