Race to decipher symbols on ancient tablet that'd redefine understanding of our ancestors

A tantalizing, but badly damaged tablet dating back to, at least, 5079 BC could predate the earliest known human writing by millennia. Comparative analysis of the Dispilio Tablet alongside symbols seen on Neolithic cave paintings and clay tablets, they argue, may yet decipher this lost language. The lakeside, late Neolithic settlement at Dispelio has become an educational tourism hot spot in Greece - adorned with recreations of homes once built by its Stone Age inhabitants The over thirty-year quest to explain the Dispilio Tablet, sometimes also called the 'Dupyak Tablet,' had its first breakthrough in 2014, when collaborative research by two Greek universities revaluated decades of radiocarbon-dating at the dig site. Above, the actual cedar wood Dispilio Tablet - carved with 10 rows of linear apparent symbols, some resembling the Greek letters Delta, Epsilon and Lambda In Column A, above, are examples of the carved, possible 'symbols' detected on the wooden tablet and other clay finds from Dispilio; Column B shows samples of an ancient Minoan script called 'Linear A' and in Column C samples of Vinca culture engravings found in the Balkans Markings from late Neolithic Greece resembling these classical Greek letters, Delta, Epsilon and Lambda, they argued, could further complicate prehistory's relationship to classical ancient Greece, linking it to the Vinca via their Tărtăria tablets. The Dispilio Tablet was found northwest of the 'Eastern sector' in marsh mud 'When you look at the symbols on the caves in France and Spain, you have to realize that these are things our ancestors were already comfortable with,' according to Canadian Stone Age art and language expert Genevieve von Petzinger.