Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Plate 1 A row of dots, a grid, a zigzag, two club-shaped claviforms and a roof-shaped tectiform

Cave art signs

The dots, lines, grids, zigzags, hands and other non-figurative marks painted and engraved in Ice Age caves, often beside the animals. Genevieve von Petzinger counts 32 signs repeated across Europe over some 30,000 years. What they meant is not known.

Cave and rock art. Also called cave art symbols, cave painting symbols, geometric signs, paleolithic symbols.

Meaning

France’s Ministry of Culture sums up the subjects of Ice Age cave art as three: animals, human figures and signs. It divides the signs into two kinds. Simple ones, dots, lines and streaks, turn up everywhere. Elaborate ones, branching signs and four- or five-sided shapes, are found at only a few sites. Some shapes have Latin names: penniform, “feather-shaped”, and tectiform, “roof-shaped”. The paleoarchaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, who has catalogued them across the continent, counts 32 distinct signs in Ice Age Europe, among them dots, asterisks, spirals and negative hands, and TED’s account of her work notes that geometric signs outnumber pictures of animals and people in the caves by at least two to one. Some cluster in one region: large rows and circles of red dots in northern Spain, the tectiform at only nine caves, all between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago. At Chauvet large red dots were made by pressing a painted palm to the wall. No living tradition holds the meaning of these marks, and no source claims to read them.

Origin and history

The first readings of cave signs were about hunting. In caves of the Ariège some painted bison had arrow-like marks on their flanks, and archaeologists took the art as hunting magic; the theory faded, the Ministry of Culture notes, as more caves were found and so few animals proved to be marked. André Leroi-Gourhan counted where each kind of animal and sign was placed and argued that each had its own sector, which made the cave, for him, an organised world.

Von Petzinger was drawn to the signs as a student, when most attention went to the animals. She built a database of the signs recorded at the nearly 370 known Ice Age rock art sites in Europe, and in 2013 and 2014 she and her husband, the photographer Dillon von Petzinger, spent seven months documenting signs in 52 caves in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy where they had been noted but not recorded. Across 30,000 years and the whole continent, she found, the same 32 signs came back again and again. “That really small number tells you that they must have been meaningful to the people who were using them,” she told TED. Each sign has its own history in her data. The negative hand is among the oldest and most common between 40,000 and 22,000 years ago; the penniform first appears between 30,000 and 28,000 years ago; the tectiform is short-lived and local, which she thinks may make it a group’s own mark. She also found that two-thirds of the signs were already in use when modern humans arrived in Europe, and suggests some may have come with them out of Africa.

Signs have also been used to date caves. Von Petzinger and Nowell compared the signs at Chauvet with those of other French caves to test whether its paintings could really be as old as their radiocarbon dates, and concluded that they could.

Are the signs a form of writing?

Not as writing is usually understood. Von Petzinger points out that people began to develop sophisticated systems of graphic communication only about 5,000 years ago, and a 2026 statistical study found the oldest sign sequences clearly unlike writing. What researchers ask is whether the signs carried information in a more limited way. Von Petzinger points to the “La Pasiega inscription” in northern Spain, about 16,000 years old, a rare case of several signs strung together, as a possible early attempt at a more complex message. That study, by Bentz and Dutkiewicz, analysed several thousand signs on more than 200 carved objects of the Aurignacian, 43,000 to 34,000 years old, from the first modern humans in central Europe. The sequences were clearly unlike modern writing, but their statistics were comparable to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets, and the signs were packed more densely on ivory figurines than on tools. They write that this does not prove the signs recorded numbers or ideas the way proto-cuneiform did, only that they were used systematically and by convention.

The oldest signs, and the Neanderthal question

Some of the oldest dated cave paintings are signs. In 2012 a team led by Pike dated the calcite grown over paintings in eleven Spanish caves and found minimum ages of 40,800 years for a red disk at El Castillo and 35,600 years for a club-shaped sign at Altamira; the team wrote that either the first modern humans in Europe painted caves or Neanderthals did too. In 2018 Hoffmann and colleagues, several of them from the same team, reported that a red linear sign at La Pasiega, a hand stencil at Maltravieso and red-painted cave formations (speleothems) at Ardales are more than 64,800 years old, 20,000 years before modern humans reached Europe, which would make the painters Neanderthals. Slimak and colleagues replied that the data better support an age of about 47,000 years, which would fit the archaeology around them. Hoffmann’s team answered that the criticisms were unfounded. The question is still open. Von Petzinger notes a crosshatched engraving from a cave in Gibraltar that appears to be Neanderthal work, and that some signs older than 30,000 years might be theirs.

Dots, spirals and lines elsewhere

The same simple shapes recur in rock art far from Ice Age Europe, and that does not mean they meant the same thing. Spirals carved by the ancestors of Pueblo peoples in the American Southwest are read by the National Park Service as solar calendars (see Petroglyphs); the spiral as a motif has its own page, the spiral. The last painters at the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia covered the walls with red zigzags, dots and circles about 1,300 years ago.

See also

Altamira Cave, Cueva de las Manos (hand stencils), Cuneiform, Lascaux cave paintings, Chauvet Cave, Lion Man.

Sources

  1. Themes (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Themes”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Parietal art › Themes
  2. Interpretations (Lascaux, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Lascaux: “Interpretations”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Archaeological research › Interpretations
  3. What the mysterious symbols made by early humans can teach us (TED Ideas, interview with Genevieve von Petzinger), TED Ideas, “What the mysterious symbols made by early humans can teach us about how we evolved”, interview with Genevieve von Petzinger, TED Conferences, article text and captions
  4. A place in time: situating Chauvet within the long chronology of symbolic behavioral development (von Petzinger and Nowell, 2014), G. von Petzinger and A. Nowell, “A place in time: situating Chauvet within the long chronology of symbolic behavioral development”, Journal of Human Evolution 74 (2014): 37–54, Journal of Human Evolution (Elsevier), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  5. Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs (Bentz and Dutkiewicz, PNAS 2026), C. Bentz and E. Dutkiewicz, “Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs”, PNAS 123 (2026): e2520385123, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, abstract (Europe PMC record)
  6. U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain (Pike et al., Science 2012), A. W. G. Pike, D. L. Hoffmann, M. García-Diez et al., “U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain”, Science 336 (2012): 1409–1413, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  7. U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art (Hoffmann et al., Science 2018), D. L. Hoffmann, C. D. Standish, M. García-Diez et al., “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art”, Science 359 (2018): 912–915, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  8. Comment on Hoffmann et al. (Slimak et al., Science 2018), L. Slimak, J. Fietzke, J.-M. Geneste and R. Ontañón, “Comment on ‘U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art’”, Science 361 (2018): eaau1371, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  9. Response to Comment on Hoffmann et al. (Hoffmann et al., Science 2018), D. L. Hoffmann et al., “Response to Comment on ‘U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art’”, Science 362 (2018): eaau1736, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  10. Chronology (Museo de Altamira), Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira, “Chronology”, Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira (Ministerio de Cultura, Spain), The cave › Chronology
  11. Aurignacian cave art (Chauvet, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Chauvet cave: “Aurignacian cave art”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Research › Aurignacian cave art
  12. Learn to look at petroglyphs and pictographs (National Park Service), National Park Service, “Learn to Look at Petroglyphs and Pictographs”, U.S. National Park Service, article
  13. The Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas: nomination file and ICOMOS evaluation (UNESCO, 1999), Argentina, nomination of “The Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas” to the World Heritage List, with the ICOMOS evaluation (property 936), UNESCO World Heritage Centre, nomination, p. 15

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from circles or lines.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

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