This episode is brought to you by Sun Express Airlines.

Looking for an affordable escape for the whole family, Sun Express has you covered.

Early birth deals to Turkey start at just 5999, fly non-stop to Sanyantalia or Scenic Ismia.

Perfect for making family memories.

These low fares won't last long so book now tan later at sunexpress

dot com and secure your seats today it's monday january 9th 20 2020. I'm Jackson Bird today. A cave art discovery that could put the development of writing back thousands of years. Plus one U.S. state taking concrete steps against misinformation. And Benoit Blanc isn't just playing among us.

Now he's in it.

Here's some cool stuff for your ride home.

A discovery by an amateur archaeologist might have just pushed back the birth of writing by about 10,000

years, depending on your definition of writing. Much of the earliest writing was practical, not creative,

you know, lists of livestock and inventories, things like that. And generally, it's accepted that the earliest writing systems emerged around 3 to 4,000

years ago, mostly in Mesopotamia to begin with.

What's sometimes called proto-writing, that is, symbols and markers used to represent items

or concepts, goes back a few thousand years earlier, still snugly within

the Neolithic era, however, which began about 10,000 years ago.

But from the Paleolithic era in Europe, we have hundreds of cave paintings.

Many of these are of various animals, you know, bison, fish, wild horses, extinct types of

cattle. So these date back to about 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, back when humans were still hunter

gatherers. But the cave paintings don't just depict animals. Some of them are decorated with short series of dots and lines, a handful of

them together in a row, often four, sometimes as many as 13, and sometimes there's a Y shape

beside the animals as well. And for decades, archaeologists have been uncertain about the true

meaning of these markings,

...