A "person off the street" may have rewritten human history

Weekend reading:

Below is an excerpt from, and link to, an article entitled "A Total Amateur May Have Just Rewritten Human History With Bombshell Discovery: Ben Bacon is "effectively a person off the street," but he and his academic co-authors think they've found the earliest writing in human history" by Becky Ferreira for Vice, January 5, 2023, 9:46am.

The article contains a link to the academic study that followed.  I found it interesting to see how an originally very simple thought was then analyzed in great and complicated detail by the academics.  Mr. Bacon is listed as the first author.  Since he now has a publication to his name, perhaps we can consider him an independent scholar although I don't know how much research he conducted himself.

It's always nice to see that curiosity about the world around us can yield big discoveries--perhaps they are even more possible for people who haven't been intensively trained on just how to observe and interpret what they see and so are able to see something afresh.

"Ben Bacon, a furniture conservator based in London, U.K. who has described himself as “effectively a person off the street,” happened to notice these markings while admiring images of European cave art, and developed a hunch that they could be decipherable. Now, Bacon has unveiled what he believes is “the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens,” in the form of a prehistoric lunar calendar, according to a study published on Thursday in the Cambridge Archeological Journal. "