Now the fun starts. Canadian archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger has completed a comprehensive study iof all the small marks and signs on the walls of Cro-Magnon caves. He identifies 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, which appear again and again at numerous sites dating across the whole chronological span of late Ice Age art in western Europe. Many of the signs are simple, others are more complex, but they seem to have some form of meaning, perhaps even being a kind of written communication. Some of the symbols appear in pairs; there are hints of formal groupings, something characteristic of early pictographic scripts. Open angles and dots are found at 42 sites; other signs such as ladders are much less common.  If von Petzinger’s withstands critical appraisal, and it is certainly impressive work, we may have the earliest evidence of symbolic meanings being communicated by signs in human history. This should not surprise us, given the very complex symbolic beliefs of today’s hunter-gatherer groups, but, of course, the question of questions is what did this seemingly simple symbolic system mean? Clearly, if it was a system, the meanings behind it were complex indeed. Alas, we will never know—but the von Petzinger study seems to confirm what we have long known—that the Cro-Magnons lived in a very complex symbolic world, something that their predecessors, the Neanderthals never enjoyed.