The Earliest Traces of Protowriting: Compositional Glyphs in the Palaeolithic

Work on individual Upper Palaeolithic signs generally takes the form of inventories. One sign, Lozenge <◊>, has been interpreted as the stylisation of a fish. Other signs are still incomprehensible, but may have carried ethnoscientific value as shared observations about the world. We report on the cooccurrence of two common signs, <◊> and Pipe . We argue (i) that the meaning of is identifiable from its distribution, and (ii) that its fusion with <◊> into a single sign is semantically compositional.