Button highlights ‘32 recurring signs’ in Ice Age art as possible long-lived symbolic system

What was said

"she found 32 recurring signs across a period of 30,000 years all across the continent. And these signs she thinks are like a not a language as such but a kind of a a system of encoding meaning."

Button points to work he attributes to archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, saying she documented repeated symbols appearing alongside Ice Age cave art across Europe over roughly 30,000 years. He describes the claim as evidence of structured symbolic communication predating conventional writing systems by tens of thousands of years.