The symbols, discovered on 40,000-year-old artifacts in caves in southwest Germany, may have been a precursor to the first written language ...

Rows of tiny crosses and dots run along the flank of a mammoth no bigger than your palm. Someone carved it from a tusk around ...

More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age humans were carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these ...

An Assyrian gypsum cuneiform dedicatory panel, reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, circa 1243-1207 BC. Of rectangular form, finely engraved on both sides, with 280 lines of text divided into eight columns ...

The man in the center with the full white beard is Mr. Finkel, an expert on cuneiform writing. The British Museum has 130,000 cuneiform clay tablets waiting to be deciphered. Finkel has a clay tablet ...

Ancient carvings once thought decorative may actually be early attempts to record information. Their statistical complexity matches that of proto-cuneiform, pushing the origins of writing-like systems ...

New research shows early humans created structured ancient symbol systems 40,000 years ago, long before formal writing appeared.

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis ...

“The artifacts date back to tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems, to the time when Homo sapiens left Africa, settled in Europe, and encountered Neanderthal,” explained Ewa ...

Digital Clay: Cuneiform languages represent the earliest known writing systems in human history. The Sumerians used this method by making indentations in clay tablets, a practice later adopted by ...