Christian Bentz – CUDAN Lecture

When: 2025-11-12 16:00-18:00 (Tallinn time)
Where: A108 & online

The event is public via zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/94629959885?pwd=2NktNsXm0SzbzwwmfGbqlk5UZQoARw.1
Meeting ID: 946 2995 9885 Passcode: 007238

Speaker

Christian Bentz
Saarland University, Germany

Lecture title
Statistical properties of a 40,000 year old sign system

Abstract Geometric signs are abundant in paleolithic mobile art as well as cave art. There are plenty of hypotheses regarding their meaning and function. However, these are necessarily hard to test and remain controversial. We here propose to take a step back and ask: what can we say about the basic statistical properties of paleolithic signs in comparison to other sign systems such as proto-cuneiform and modern writing? To tackle this question we focus on a clearly circumscribed corpus of mobile objects from cave sites of the Swabian Aurignacian which is openly published as part of the SignBase 2.0 database. We compare the sign sequences on these objects in terms of their “statistical fingerprint” to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets of the Uruk periods, as well as a diverse set of modern day writing systems. While paleolithic sequences are clearly distinguishable from modern day writing systems, they, surprisingly, fall inside the range of the earliest proto-cuneiform, and are hard to distinguish from these. At the face of it, modern humans of the Swabian Aurignacian of c. 40.000 years ago have already developed sign systems which have the information encoding potential of the earliest proto-cuneiform. However, while proto-cuneiform subsequently developed into full-blown writing systems within c. 500-1000 years, the sign systems of the Swabian Aurignacian remained stable in terms of their information encoding potential over at least 5000 years, and then disappeared.

Links
https://www.christianbentz.de/ https://www.erc-evine.de/