And they are more than 10,000 years older than previous examples.
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00:00Humanity's writing systems have come a long way in the last couple of hundred years alone.
00:07But what was it like 20,000 years ago?
00:09Well, researchers studying ancient cave paintings may finally have that answer,
00:13as they believe they have just discovered the earliest example of human writing.
00:17This is what they are now calling the proto-writing system.
00:20But what does it mean?
00:21The researchers say the cave drawings depict records of animal mating seasons,
00:25broken down into the lunar months throughout the year.
00:27And while the writings don't contain letters per se,
00:30the dots, lines, and Y-shaped symbols do appear to mean something.
00:33The markings seem to indicate when each animal's mating season would happen.
00:37Crucial information for a hunter-gatherer group,
00:39with the Y symbol indicating a month of birth for a particular animal.
00:43But the most wild thing is that these symbols weren't simply found in one spot,
00:46but rather all over Europe in caves that were inhabited in the last ice age.
00:50With the discovery being especially interesting,
00:52as it means humans were using the written word 14,000 years earlier than experts previously thought.