Sticks, stars, sickness: Charting the way we were

If you wanted to know when the bison were returning, and when to expect the next hearty steak, you likely checked the latest cave update, in Ancient Lascaux, France.

- Sukanya Datta

For nearly a century, ever since the caves were discovered in 1940, anthropologists have struggled to decode the lines, dots and Y-shaped marks carved into the rock here.

Now, in a study published last year, researchers from Durham University and University College London, analysed 800 such sequences and found that they contained 13 types of marks (sets of lines, dots and Y symbols), in patterns consistent with the 13 months in a lunar year.

Suddenly, the message of the marks became clearer: they could represent the mating, migration and birthing patterns of the deer, bison and horses drawn alongside.

No one likely lived in the Lascaux caves; they were more of an art and information centre. And so these marks, made 17,000 to 20,000 years ago, could represent the earliest public data charts in the world.

Go further back, as much as 50,000 years ago, and bones have been found across Africa and parts of Eastern Europe, with notches in them that coincide with the phases of the moon. These bones would have acted as a sort of early calendar.

These systems, of knots, notches and dashes, would endure for tens of thousands of years.

In 15th century South America - in the vast but largely isolated Inca civilisation that operated without money and without a script - a system of knotted ropes called quipu were used to track transactions and debt; record census data; track grain reserves.

We have been visualising data in one way or another, then, since more or less the start of collective living.

Charts came before language, trade and poetry. Because, first, we had to tackle the question of how to track the new sheep added to a flock, the days left before the wildebeest moved south, the number of people in a kingdom or soldiers lost at war.